LOVELIFE.

Travel Is Dangerous

2012-02-22T18:41:00.000-08:00

The other day I had a really weird dream.

Among the bizarre mish-mash of images, the one that grabbed me was of course when she held my hand. Of course it did. The night before, I spoke with Golden about my actually wanting to ask someone out. First time in nearly two years, second time in nearly five years.

Frankly, aside from Corey, I've not felt up for asking anyone out because I'm HIV-positive. And with Corey that was a non-issue because he is too. But, now, after that debacle, here I am.

Last time I asked someone out before Corey was a co-worker, and I'm using that as a reason not to this time. Partly. But mostly it's being sick.

The one thing I've not asked anyone I know about but really want to know is how to approach it. The asking someone out and eventually, if things go well, telling them. Corey once said to me he waited until the third date, something like that.

Anyway, there's a woman I'm interested in. We work together. And, as the game's played, she gave me an obvious opening to ask her out last week...and I didn't take it. It's who was in the dream, holding my hand, smiling when I told her about the song playing (Mogwai's TRAVEL IS DANGEROUS).

I'm reminded too of Shawn Decker's MY PET VIRUS: his trepidation of asking women out after he's grown up with the virus. Also, Frederik Peeters' BLUE PILLS. And as gorgeous as the stories are, as likely, I choose to be afraid. Afraid of the simple rejection because it will mean something more. It will prove me right. The thing I've thought about for way too damn long. I think if we go out, and things go well, and maybe something develops, and then she says she can't continue with me. This specter that's haunted me for nearly five years now is everywhere. And every time I speak with her, I get all funny inside and I really like her smile, and she's really funny.

So, how do you ask a woman out when you're HIV-positive? I really want to know.

* * *

Then there's this over at Lou O'Bedlam's blog.

Update!

2012-01-11T18:12:00.000-08:00

So, my Flickr account is all but dead and mostly because I'm killing it with my lack of posts. Whatever. Maybe my hipsterly camera kung-fu is finally over.

On the other hand, eleven days in and there are eleven little story bits over at 405 (click here!). Some are lazy, others less so...

...and today, writer Warren Ellis posts a link to this interview with writer William Gibson, and it's all the encouragement to continue.

354 to go, and it's all because of Henry Rollins and now William Gibson!

Thirty-Five Januaries

2012-01-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

I have these little wrinkles around my eyes and I'm twenty pounds lighter. I hate this time of year.

Won't be until - say - February that the weird "new year feeling" will sink in. And mostly because, well, there isn't going back, is there?

So, I've done very little for the last six months. Nothing more than working and sleeping, maybe some reading. Nothing else. The gross over-exaggeration notwithstanding, I want to do something. I always want to do something. I never know what that is, and it's why I'm not past the "amateur" phase at life. There you are, and I'm going to give myself a couple of things to do because sometimes I think my brain is rotting from misuse. Whatever.

Once the site is back to working today, over at 405, I'm going to write one thing a day for all of 2012. I haven't written anything substantial in too long a time. And I think I work well this way. And I say "work" and mostly I think it's fun. It makes me laugh, these writing bits I set down. Sometimes they make me sad. But hearing it from Henry Rollins while in Book Soup a couple months ago with Golden and Brittany, I realized I don't write daily. Rollins' recommendation. Of course, this is the recommendation from any writer, whether I like their work or not, to anyone who wants to write. I can't go back to being 19-20 years old when I did. But there is no creative output I feel proud of recently because there has been nothing worth mentioning (although a microstory I posted made me laugh!).

Over at Flickr and Instagram (same username: jchavezloeza), I'm going to take a picture and write a little blurb a day about 365 people, places, things I like. Because there must be, right? The reason behind this too is that it'll get me writing a bit more. Kind of like a warm up (hopefully!). And seeing as how I like to thrown things at people I think are awesome already, I might as well put a little effort into it, at least. I'm terrible as this type of thing. But, as mentioned, I need to write everyday, even if it is a little blurb about why I love David Fincher's movies.

A couple of days ago, Golden and I had lunch and I told her the story of how I wound up meeting up with her wearing designer jeans. She was on her break so I couldn't really get into the story how I wanted. And I want to tell you too, but that's for later. And this story, once I get there, will bring me back to where I was in 2009 and a year ago and last month and will rant and rave. Because it's what I do. So I can write daily, of course.

I suppose I can write here more often, in the way that I used to so many years ago. Not as a journal, the way this reads. But then, I remember when I first started writing, I wasn't working, I was in a new city, I read more, I did more things. Now, I don't.

But back to the writing: sometimes I read something that isn't a story and it makes me think people are terribly arrogant and simple because it's about money. Everyone talking about what it is their writing is worth. And I asked the question (and received no response), if no one ever read what you wrote, never paid you for it, would you still do it? The answer has to be yes. Always yes. I remember Corey and I having a conversation about how when you write something - article, tweet, post, novel, whatever - the writer should never write for the audience, whether it exists, regardless of size, or not. He disagreed with me. But that's where, at the beginning of 2012, I've arrived. The even imagined-moneytization of creativity is horrible. This coming from an amateur.

I have meetings in my calendar for months into the future. I need to take suits to be tailored. maybe I ought to be more on top of things about my health. Lose another twenty-pounds. Reach back to people I miss. Ask this woman out. Be nicer. Take care of my family more. Be more patient. I don't really know. But I like my brain better and I am taking a shot at making it work a bit this year. That's what it's about. Setting things down on paper. Or on the computer. You know what I mean.

Here's to day one.

C

2011-12-02T07:23:00.000-08:00

This week two of my favorite internet people - journalists, writers, bloggers, bad-ass women, Susannah Breslin and Xeni Jardin - revealed they have breast cancer.

I don't know them personally but something...clicked in my brain and my heart when I heard this. They're not personal friends to me, but they know each other (sometimes their twitter conversations with photographer Clayton Cubitt are hilarious!), and within three days of Breslin's diagnosis, Jardin's comes and I want to hug them!

Susannah Breslin writes about her experience on Forbes.com. Xeni Jardin tweeted her first mammogram, culminating in the diagnosis.

As I read Ms Breslin's post I'm reminded of how these things change you and your perception of the world. Something becomes askew and no matter how hard you try to express it, frankly, if you don't have cancer, you can't ever know. Your perception of yourself is two-fold: you begin to look at yourself, probably as damaged and fragile, and you begin to look at yourself physically, trying to find this thing inside you, as if you can see it crawling just beneath your skin, partly out of fascination and partly out of being scared.

I've never had cancer, but when I first discovered I was HIV-positive, it was the single thing that changed my life the most, not in an outward way, not even physically nor emotionally, but it fundamentally changed the way I see myself in the world. I mentioned to Ms Breslin how it reminded me of this, her post.

I have this idea that a few months, maybe a year or so down the line, once both Susannah and Xeni beat this, they'll be having a good ol' chat over coffee somewhere in New York (I'm not really sure why NYC), and laugh and talk about it. Maybe they'll commiserate. Maybe there'll be tears...

...I don't know, I'm sort of a little weird this way: sure, it's fucking cancer, but at least you're not alone. Is that terrible to think? I remember last year (man, time flies!) when Corey and I had that conversation about strangers reaching out to us about being HIV-positive.

No, I don't know Susannah Breslin and Xeni Jardin. But in a rather odd and a bit sad way, Ithink I do. And if you know them, give them a hug for me.

Yesterday

2011-11-06T07:10:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid - what, something like around my late teens - I used to think to myself that if I hit thirty-five, that would be a long enough life. Everything afterward was just gravy, you know? And I used to go around believing television and comics and not real life as to what life would bring with it.

Adventure! Heartache! Travel! EXCITEMENT!!!

Of course, growing up, everything is a process and all of these things DO come along. It'd be dismissive to not acknowledge all of it: for one day I was in New York City, for instance, and lived all of it!

The scary things that come with life aren't ever given a face when you're growing up, however, because no matter what you may imagine will come, you're an indestructible piece of flash machinery and unstoppable. Nothing is a monster when you're a kid!

Recently, as ridiculous as it sounds, as I'm reading some really smart, fun, and entertaining books (Richard Kadrey's ALOHA FROM HELL, Chuck Palahniuk's DAMNED, William Gibson's PATTERN RECOGNITION), I appreciate these little stories for what the truth they share...and still glance at them as bullshit. Paradoxically, as I'm reading, I want to scream into the pages that what they're selling isn't real life. Then I think of this quote from Grant Morrison.

I've not been very happy for a bit and what's getting me down aside from the typically mundane things like money woes, debt, work, friends, family, illness, is the lack of excitement I used to have for tomorrow. I used to be excited by the idea of tomorrow. Not in a conceptualized, futurist way (I think), but the very cliche that everything exciting is waiting tomorrow. How's that for cynical: thinking all the excitement's run out in my life.

Think I'm a terrible rut.

Recently, the best friend and I have spent hours talking boys and girls, and even that's lost some luster because it's become routine. It's become daily life. I feel weighed down by everything that's become my universe. Most folk, I think, can appreciate all of these daily trials because there are things to be learned from all of this. I know this too. But this isn't what I signed up for when I was born. Is that terrible?

I don't know.

Home life, work life, personal life, none of it is horrible and obnoxious and sad. Not really. Taking in the bigger picture as it is, I'm pretty damn fortunate. I don't think I appreciate it enough, frankly, and all of these things I think are perhaps a form of selfishness. At work this week, in talking with the boys there about marriage, one of them said that I had passed the point in life where that was something to want. And I wonder as we get older does that keep happening? Like a road trip, is life a long journey and the stops are places off the side of the road that you pass by after you consider stopping and then say to yourself, "There'll be something else up ahead," not considering that perhaps there won't be? Not that I'm regretting ever investing time with someone enough to want to make them my life partner. I don't feel that. But I wonder if all the excitement I used to feel about tomorrow's now an off-ramp that I passed years, weeks, days, hours ago.

Me, nattering like this, is what annoys me the most.

Yesterday, while looking through the company's intranet, I discovered openings at work that aren't necessarily interesting but look like might be fun. Puerto Rico, New York, California. Wishful thinking in a way. Because responsibility isn't easy to slough off, right? And I then make myself upset by conniving ways to make things happen where everyone is happy first and then myself. Which is NOT a way in which to do things in life. I've learned that much.

I think, the work thing notwithstanding, that I'm looking for the fun that I always believed would exist along with the idea of tomorrow. I'm not an old man, not yet, and I'm wondering where all the fun went. My idea of fun.

I turn thirty-five in two months.

David

2011-10-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

I was twenty-one so it was 1998. I remember meeting a friend of a friend, but I'm not certain why I needed to meet him. Best friend at the time had started a new job and she really liked her co-workers, I remember that. So, I went with her to one of her co-worker's house to pick something up, or drop something off. He came out to meet us and they talked about whatever and I was introduced and he had dimples and a cleft chin. This was David.

This was maybe a year or two after I'd come to terms with my sexuality. This was when I was at my awkward best.

I remember talking about him non-stop. He was just so pretty. It was the first boy I'd met who'd made want to know more about him, to maybe kiss him. Maybe. When he gave me his phone number it was a pretty special day, let me just tell you. I remember using up the break in between classes to call him up and talk on the payphone in the student union. I remember he liked the Disney villain Malificient and thought Bruce Willis was hot. All it ever came to, as always, was my immaturity and a PULP FICTION viewing at his house, where his parents looked at me like an escaped felon, and a group date to see Grease. He held my hand the entire time.

I wrote about him a lot at the time. I used to write a lot then. And I wrote about how I wanted him and how he made me feel and how beautiful I thought he was. I remember all of it. I still have that notebook. I just remember him smiling at me atop that hill where his house was in San Pedro.

(Unfortunately, my memories of this boy are tied to the fact that my two brothers read everything I wrote about him and told my parents and then, well, everything turned out the way it did. This created a huge rift between my family and me that lingers to this day. That day, when talking with my father, was the worse moment of my young life. It was the last time he ever struck me.)

But every once in a while, I tell someone this story, all the details I remember, and it makes me happy because I remember this unassuming boy whom I adored to no end, and it was the first instance I felt I was normal. If you're straight or gay, you wouldn't understand.

It always makes me happy to think about him.

Earlier today, while online on my phone, talking with strangers on a hook-up site, a man sent me a message and we started talking for a bit and he was nice and playful and cute. He's attractive. And he reminded me of someone I used to work with. But that wasn't right. It lingered with me for the entire afternoon when I realized who this stranger online reminded me of David. The stranger's smile wasn't familiar but it wasn't a strange one either. A couple hours ago, as I'm making my way from Orange County, it hit me: was this David? Something clicked into place. While this man and I were flirting online in the way guys do online (read: being explicit), I needed to log off but I thought, fuck it, and gave him my number. On the freeway, I kept checking my phone for a text or call. I realized he never told me his name, and he didn't give me his number. Playing coy, my plans was that the next move would be his...

...BUT NOW I WANT TO KNOW IF IT'S DAVID!!

Isn't that crazy?

What if it is?

Most likely, it isn't. And like with certain strangers on the internet, I will probably never hear from him again. I latched on to a weird set of circumstances that have made my heart go all a-flutter, and when I never hear from this man, I will forget about him in the way we do sometimes. A stranger on the internet called me hot and I'm having fond memories about him already.

But that's okay.

I will still remember David. Not because he was the love of my life. But he was one of the very first.

Read: Damned

2011-10-24T21:51:00.000-07:00

Madison Spencer is dead. DAMNED is the story of her time in Hell. Is all this obvious? Perhaps: there IS a devil on the cover.

But what follows is walk through a thirteen year old girl's life that ought to have been great, ought to have been the type of life contemporary thirteen year olds yearn for: super-rich and super-famous and, sadly, super-liberal movie star parents; houses in every possible continent, access to drugs, and Hello Kitty condoms. But Madison isn't happy. No, not until she meets her parents' new pet adoptee, Goran.

After she dies, Madison takes you through Chuck Palahniuk's version of Hell that's complete with the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions, Shit Lake, and...well, you get the idea. Also, Hitler shows up because why shouldn't he?

This is Palahniuk at his nihilistic, most acerbic best. He's not reached this height of humor and cynicism and truth in a very long time (TELL-ALL read like a warm-up exercise, RANT was a bit too loose, SNUFF wasn't what it could've been, HAUNTED tried and failed at clever). What he does in having Madison guide us through Hell isn't to show how frightening that prospect is, but rather how easy it is to being damned. Through her monologues, Madison discovers along the way that we're all so close to eternal damnation, even taking all the vitamins and recycling everything isn't enough to save anyone. Surely, according to her, nearly everyone's already earned a trip to Hell by age five for peeing in pools - there's a limit, you see, to how many times you're allowed to pee in pools before you're damned and it's two.

But all through Madison's adventures through Hell, it isn't that we're learning along with her the rules of this place or why people wind up here, but more about what we tell others and ourselves to make us seem less likely to die as sinners. We want to win when it comes to our eternal afterlife, never realizing our afterlives are already decided. But this isn't a religious book. Not really.

DAMNED, similar to Palahniuk's other books, is about being happy with who and what you are. About not giving a whit about what anyone else says. About self-determination and self-reliance. DAMNED is about forgetting everything everyone else thinks about you and being the only you the world deserves. Madison can only be that once she dies. Even despite the fack her parents tried and tried to be better than any other parents, they failed in nurturing the person Madison needed to be in this world. But it was only by dying and going to Hell that she sees this, that we see this. When everything is demons and death for eternity, it's easy to see that who we are in Hell isn't who we are on Earth: who we are in the latter is not us.

Palahniuk brings us back to self-destruction as self-realization. Realizing that people who're still alive and their terrible superiority complex over the dead is only transitory and only death is certain.

The imagery in the book reminded me of Chris Weston's Hell in LUCIFER and his work in THE FILTH, how I imagined it as I read: I'd love to see his version of the Sea of Insects. Palahniuk doesn't go into lots of detail with his Hell, but when you read his topography, it's hard not see a certain...aesthetic. What do you imagine when you read the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm?

And, finally, as Madison confronts Satan himself, Palahniuk manages a pretty nasty trick on her that I want to spoil so badly but wont. Because in that exchange, when I wanted a suave manipulator akin to Neil Gaiman's and Mike Carey's LUCIFER, I got a more "real" Satan: a Satan for the post-Hollywood world.

I laughed along with this book not because of its outlandish scenery but because it's more honest about what life is on Earth than I was taught in Catechism. It's honest when Madison says that we all think we're better off than the dead because we're simply alive. It's honest when she says that everyone, like her parents, obsessed with remaining youthful will end up as worm fodder. But unlike FIGHT CLUB, DAMNED doesn't say there's worse things than death. Madison is our avatar through our own stories, regardless of age, full of ridiculous experiences that we allow to define ourselves in the bigger picture, the bigger picture being life.

Free Life

2011-10-12T20:30:00.000-07:00

Went to the movies today. I shouldn't have because payday's next week and there's insurance to still pay. But I went and had a big ol' cry there due to the movie not necessarily because I was/am terribly sad or anything like that. Still, right? Anyway, afterward, I spent another $5 on a coffee and a shortbread raspberry cookie thing because I left a voicemail for my best friend and was still a little shaken. So strange how things affect me. Or not. I think I'm made of metal and then I'm melted.

Honest: for a long time - almost two years now - I've had a terrible idea not everyone I know and don't know would like to hear and that is going of the meds for the extra cash.

Just right now I was thinking, suppose I'd never had to go to the doctor four years ago and I never discovered I'd HIV, where would I be now? I don't know and neither does anyone else because that never happened. But, what if, you know?

I wonder how we got to this point where this is even worth considering. Years ago, if someone mentioned this to me, I'd tell them they were insane, and here I am thinking this. But is it that bad? No, not really. I could use five grand right now and I know lots of us could as well but that isn't going to happen. or, if I did indeed stop the the meds for the money, I think it would be easier to just spend it on something wholly necessary.

The family is in really bad form right now. Not only financially. Not a lot of us are happy. I'd go even a little further into it: I don't think a lot of us are content or satisfied with what's happening, any of it. Who is, really?

So, I'm at the movies and guy in the movie says he just wants it to stop, the disease he has. And that's where I am and I think using the family trials as the reason for it to stop is kind of a cop-out. Isn't it? Is it?

What if I decided to stop treatment, would you hate me, shun me, support me, or say nothing? Is this one of those cry for help things? Do I mean a slow-speed suicide? What is it?

As I've written many times over the last few years, I want it to stop, all these pills every week; the way in which everything my family says around me is tinged with sadness and fear; the way in which whenever I mention being sick all I get is silence; thinking the pretty girl I want to ask out from work will just walk away when I tell her; the way my mother looks at me sometimes. And the way I see myself daily. I just want it all to stop so I can be normal again.

Haven't had a fit like this in a while. I don't really know what normal means.

But, as I said, there's lots of things to take care of for the family. I hate my living situation but without me they can't keep the house nor put food on the table nor even enjoy a smoke every now and then. Silly to even type all that. But it's true. And me, without them, I don't know really where I'd be. So the family must come first. And I'd be no use to them dying in a hospital or dead in the ground.

Way the world works is my life is the only thing I've a say over. That's it.

Way to return to the blog. I should not be allowed to go to the movies unescorted.

The Milk

2011-06-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

Since I lost my job over a year ago, every week seems to feel longer than it really is. Of course, when things are bad, I'm sure this changed perception of time is prevalent. How could it not be - we say, "Time flies when you're having fun," and all that. And what came along with that, and continues until just a few moments ago, sometimes just makes me so angry and sad and bitter and defeated.

Okay, so at my new job, I've medical insurance. It's one of those things that with losing the previous gig was a huge worry for me (nevermind, the rest of the family - they were a mess). Paying hundreds of dollars a month, even with not enough money coming in, for COBRA just so that I could continue to pay a couple hundred dollars on top of that for medication and more doctor's visits seemed so ridiculous. It's one of the reasons last year the president let me down by not pushing for Single-payer Healthcare. But anyway, so am covered now...

Late last week I called in to have my two prescriptions filled because it was time. And it was the first paycheck where the new gig was paying me decently, finally. Not great, but every dollar counts, after all. I went a couple of days ago to pick them up and was told that my COBRA insurance had lapsed. I figured, so what, I've a shiny new insurance card (the cost attached to my meds then I've talked about before). So, pharmacy guy does whatever it is they do and comes back and tells me it'll be $500 for both. Turns out I need to pay my deductible before the insurance covers what it used to. This was a rather unexpected thing to have happen.

Just got back from paying this and I am still a bit embittered and sad by the whole thing. I drove to the pharmacy crying.

Honest: one of the things that bothers me the most about this is the contrasting example of the ex and my situations beyond us both being HIV-positive: I've worked for years, paying my taxes and insurance costs and all that; he's claimed disability for a lot longer than I've been taking these fucking pills: I pay what I pay for doctor visits, emergency room visits, and medicine (the most total was in 2008 which came to roughly $4000); he pays nothing. The juxtaposition is glaring to me and shows me such an unfair disparity that it simply infuriates me, and has ever since I first discovered this. And it isn't so much because it's the ex, no. It's more due to the fact that it seems that when you play by the rules in this fucking country, well, who the fuck cares, even when it comes to staying alive. To be fair, I don't know and don't recall the details of the ex's then-situation when all this came to pass for him, nor much do I care now. What stays in my mind, and did as I drove to and back from the pharmacy just now, is that while we were together, the ex said he could get any medication he wanted and he'd get it for free (I was present first hand when he had some pills for some friend of his (hair-growth pills or some such) and I know first-hand he has easy access to boner pills (he took some when we were in San Diego last year). This is the disparity: all I want is what I need and am willing to pay for it; he's one of those people others complain about abusing the system while not paying into it.

(Okay, since am on a tear about the ex, this: I am not certain of what constitutes being disabled due to HIV-infection or AIDS - if I remember correctly, he'd said to me once that he was so sick before he couldn't work. And I'm sure this is how one does this which is fair and right, especially without access to healthcare any other way. However, in the intervening years, although I'd only known him personally for about three years, from my very biased and outsider point of view, he is not disabled any longer. This is a man who gets steroids from the public clinic he goes to because he doesn't want to loose muscle because...I think he said more muscle mass is necessary to fight off HIV cells? Something like that. I'm sure there is truth to this to a degree. But I believe it is primarily so that he doesn't become physically unattractive.)

God damn but am I angry today.

I paid my $500.

Hopefully, as it was explained to me earlier by the insurance rep, I won't be paying as much next month and so on.

Sure, I'm all "woe is me" right now, but that'll pass. This is initial shock. And it's due to having to, first, spend money that I need for other things, and, two, the fact that someone like me even has to spend money on HIV medication. This is a case, for me, where I see me as part of the working class in America and I am not catching a break: from one end of the spectrum (the ex and those like him) to another (those for whom medical care is an afterthought-expense), there is a gap wherein most of lie where we have to choose between everything that is necessary (meds, food, shelter, etc) or losing most of it. It isn't fair and it isn't right. This blog post is completely biased and written in anger and may be completely offensive and all that bullshit, but who cares? It's all of it spilled milk.

Junk Drawer

2011-06-04T20:15:00.000-07:00

I'm typing this into a machine that opened is smaller than a legal pad. Thank god for the LCD monitor I'm using with it.

* * *

Started in my new post at work this week. And it's been okay. I remember talking with my old boss on my last day and I felt so smug in knowing everything (of course!) and now that the first week is over, yes, I still know everything, but I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen with this, in this new job. Is that strange? Call me ridiculous, but as I was finishing off the last couple of days, I thought to myself that it couldn't be this easy. Can it? On the one hand, sure, I've more responsibilities; on the other, I'm finding myself doing less. I'm not sure how much I like that. Anyway, it's been only a week.

* * *

This is a link to the little bits of story I've posted on 405 so far.

* * *

And over on Flickr I'm posting a 365 bit again. Because I've no life and all I want to do is sleep.

* * *

Over the last couple of months I've not really been posting here as much as I think I want. I'm kind of sick of the sound of my voice. I'm having one of those moments.

* * *

I found a picture of the ex on some porn site a month or two back. I was online, just browsing the internet, downloading porn, I'm sure, and clicked a link, clicked a link, clicked a link, and there he was. Of course, it wasn't his name attached to it, but, please. For a brief moment, I considered just dropping him an email or something with a link so that he'd know that one of his pictures got yanked off Flickr and was being used for it. I didn't. Then, I considered the idea that, what if he is actively participating in it? I don't know which is worse, frankly.

* * *

For some reason, I got it in my head today that everything will be better in January. I don't know why, but I was watching The Cosby Show on Netflix and suddenly, it was as if I wanted January to be tomorrow because somehow that would mean that all this trouble that still seems to follow my family will all be gone. Usually, I dread every new year.

* * *

Sometimes, I think even having sex is just pointless. Even the very certainty of a blowjob isn't enough to get me out of bed.

Crime

2011-04-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

It dawns on me that I cannot commit a crime and get away with it. It isn't even forensics. I'd be caught in three minutes.

Not that my crime spree was forthcoming. Just saying.

Read: Falling Man, Richard Yates, and Player One

2011-03-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of years I've not read as much as I used to. Mostly, I think it's due to work and the internet. Obvious, really. And the third culprit is being ridiculously emo a lot. So, it goes. I'm so glad that the last couple of months have sort of included a few novels and comics re-reads. These are the last three books I loved very much.

Don DeLillo's FALLING MAN is the story of Keith, a man who survived the September 11th destruction of the World Trade Center, and how it affected him, and his estranged-wife, and life in general. What made this particularly startling for me was, as the story unfolds, it tells the story of a man who isn't necessarily the best man - arguably, someone who might've not deserved to survive - and at the same time, you can't help but place yourself in his shoes, not during this period of time, but all the time: I didn't think about what I would've done if I was Keith, but more what I would be doing now and tomorrow. It sort of contextualizes me along with Keith in a place after this particular disaster. It isn't that Keith remains unchanged, but how through this unenviable experience, his wife Lianne, seems to think there's more changed than not, while her mother points out that Lianne isn't seeing that it's the world that's different and it's the world that's making her believe Keith is different. As much of UNDERWORLD, DeLillo uses events as a driving force in the lives of individuals, his characters and me, and in showing us this, for a brief moment we can see it but forget it once the moment is over. Which is the main reason why for me, it isn't Keith who is the Falling Man, but we all are in that we attempt in separating ourselves from history when the world changes. Sure, I wondered many times if I were Keith would I be doing the same things I was doing while reading the novel, but that is all. I had no context save the book in the same way Keith September 11, 2011. It is why Keith, eventually, would remain in hotels gambling, further distancing himself from history (a futile exercise) and me still believing I was him even though so much time had passed. The story does have a few threads I didn't care for: Justin, Keith and Lianne's son and his friends vigilance over the New York sky seemed too predictable, and didn't add much for me nor did I think it served any real purpose in the story save in a "think about the children" sort of way. Another was the performance artist known as Falling Man, who would re-enact suicide leaps from building and bridges all over New York while wearing a suit, which, after the attacks, took on a more sinister meaning beside the fact he was doing nothing new. While initially too obvious, I became tired of his final appearance before Lianne: again, for me, it served as nothing more than a cartoon and an expectation in the context of the story (I don't know if this was a real person DeLillo used, or if Falling Man was made up). And the last thread I'm not sure I liked but did find a little interesting was the few sections featuring the planning of the attacks and a young man named Hammad being trained for the very purpose. While still connecting the thread of the downward man from the title, I think not so much that these few scenes add much to the whole. I find them interesting as a literary exercise, but I think had they been left out, the book would not have suffered.

I came across Tao Lin via COMING & CRYING, my favorite book of 2010. It featured an excerpt from SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL and when I saw that his new novel, RICHARD YATES, was out via the internet, I figured, why not? A young writer from New York - Haley Joel Osment - is internet friends with a teenage girl from New Jersey named Dakota Fanning, and this is the story of their relationship, how it was built and how it eroded and how it suffered...but not quite sure how it would end. Osment likes Fanning and vice versa, but her being a teenager and suffering from that makes her erratic, potentially mentally unstable, curious, but ultimately normal. The older Osment, by some six years or so (he's twenty-two), however, ought to know better in a lot of ways but he likes the young Fanning, I think, because he's simply lonely. Connecting on the internet, both see themselves in each others odd observations and declarations (both at various points tell the other they're going to kill themselves) because, as anyone who's met anyone on the internet, you play off each other really well when there's an electronic wall between you. When Osment and Fanning are finally together, neither is fully at ease with each other, and at one point in the beginning of their face to face relationship, it is Osment who first contemplates abandoning Fanning in a school bus yard. But he doesn't, and they muddle through a rather dull relationship but I think that's the very point, and very in contrast with how we learn of them, of how they learned about each other via the internet. For various reasons, I found this story and the character's dynamics rather familiar and how it plays out until the end is dull, yes, but very realistic in a way that not a lost of stories can be. Osment's force of nature way in commanding aspect's of Fanning's life resonates because there is that dynamic in a relationship between two people, romantic or otherwise. Fanning's near submission to this is very indicative of, not just her age and maturity, but of how lonely she is as well. How a relationship works in the confines of the novel escapes both of them and muddle through it in spectacularly disastrous fashion. At various times, Lin is hilarious and rather sad and wistful. And what Lin did for me was show me that sometimes, perhaps, loneliness's cure isn't another person. Whatever the intent, Lin's novel gives me a good impression of what younger folk (my generation and all proceeding it) go through individually, hoping another person will "cure" them of their angst (this might be the wrong word) and frankly maneuvering through their lives. RICHARD YATES is hugely entertaining if you love people, I think. If you love someone, it's hilarious to a point. And if you're lonely, it certainly crystallizes a few things for you (it did for me). It reminds me that 1 + 1 does not always equal 2. And that it's perfectly fine that way too.

PLAYER ONE is Douglas Coupland's most recent novel and tells the story through five points of view: Karen, off to meet a man off the internet; Rick, the bartender where Karen is waiting; Luke, a pastor whose lost his faith but stole his congregation's money; Rachel, a stunningly attractive fluke of nature; Player One, a seemingly omniscient force that knows what's about to happen and wonders why humans are this way and that. All five are trapped in Rick's bar when suddenly, the world explodes into violence, oil prices skyrocketing to the stratosphere, chemical attacks, and a sniper. Through forces they do not understand or even know existed, these five are forced to fend for themselves in the hope that something will be waiting for them on the outside once the fires are out...but do they want to? When the world ends and you get another shot at life, would you still be the same or would you change? When given a new world, do you even want to change? Coupland revisits all of the themes he's known for nearly in every page: modernism, the meanings of time and space for us, post-millenial tension, technology, the individual and her/his place in the world, commercialism, stories as a salve, religion, faith, death, love, and the ever-present question of what makes us US. What he does in PLAYER ONE is give his characters flaws necessary to come to certain conclusions (is the fact Rachel might begin to believe in God part of her brain dysfunction? Or also that the sniper's religion what ties him to her and to his violent acts?), but it doesn't feel fabricated. None of these people seem one-dimensional in the way people on television are, and you always want to root for them. Coupland uses himself as inspiration as various bits of dialogue and narrative are featured here, verbatim, which illustrates, I think, the huge thematic web he's created with all his work: that we are all more alike than not, and it fucking works. The question arises that while none of these people generally believe in fate (Luke: "Fate is for losers."), is there are reason why it is them that are holed up in an airport lounge as the world ends? The answer is no, but only I know this because I am not in the story...or aren't I? You're in there as well, having this discussion about what's going to be waiting outside your door every morning because whether you see it or not, the world is ending, and as soon as you step outside into it, you're deciding who you want to be in a particularly base and fundamental way. Or not. PLAYER ONE presents us with characters that are excitingly human because they're as boring as us, but their questions about life and death and beyond and the future are our questions, only we're not trapped together by the apocalypse to fully express them to each other. Coupland does an excellent job in tying his entire work together with PLAYER ONE for me. It has placed not just his characters - all of them - in a certain place of history (and not just literary history) but in a certain place of time: the future, and they're just as scared and unknowing as we are. In PLAYER ONE, one of the ideas that is presented is that humans unlike animals have a concept of time. However, we don't really have a concept of Eternity.

All three books about very different things have a few things in common: the relationships we have with people in general and the world, what makes us US, and what we're willing and not willing to do in the world like change ourselves from time to time. Like Keith in FALLING MAN, do you pretend that you're damaged when you're not really and use it as an escape? Like Rachel in PLAYER ONE, even if you're damaged by birth, how badly do you want to be like everyone else? Like Fanning, would -be love, is that sufficient to change everything about yourself even if you don't really want to? How do the people around us make us US, and how much of ourselves are we willing to share? In the even of catastrophe, why do we use this time to do more change than we normally would? What are the forces in the world keeping you in the place made for you, and is there even one? In my reading of these three novels, I internalize and personalize a lot, which is something we all do, I think, and left me with a sense of wonder in way. What's going on in the world currently is evidence that the world is nothing but change, yet I am relatively the only constant in my life.

I think I've gone on too long already.

It Goes...

2011-03-15T00:45:00.000-07:00

Of course I miss 'em. All of them.

But not more than I miss being stupidly drunk, out somewhere in the middle of the night in a stranger's bed.

Listen: Rainbow Arabia, THE BASTA

2011-02-22T11:11:00.000-08:00

New music genre learned: ethnotronic.

The Maiden

2011-02-19T17:43:00.000-08:00

My mother asked me the other day why I still have all my med bottles. She asked me why I don't just throw them out and I told her that I just wanted to hang on to them. Kind of like a timeline, I said, but I don't think she cared for that very much because she looked at me like I wasn't speaking Spanish. My father then said that I need to look at it from their point of view, and I asked what that was, and neither one of them said anything, but my mother, finally, said she didn't like it.

A few days ago, I was telling Jodi this little bit and she interrupted my telling to ask why was I keeping them. I said they were just like little mementos of the years since my diagnosis. And as I thought about it a bit more, I came up with something a little more sinister: once I was gone, these little plastic bottles would remain. All the chemical fighting, and I'd be dead and I'd leave behind lots of plastic. I said to Jodi that once I was gone, they're what would stay behind. I'm not certain what she said in response but it wasn't anything fully enthusiastic. That I do recall.

I'd also divined my parents' point of view: I'm going to die. These little bits are yet another grand reminder to them, I suppose, and to my friend, that I'm sick. Good thing too because I'd forgotten.

I don't want to turn it into a big thing but my question will always be (until it isn't fact, I suppose) is why is it that the ones who care about me the most seem to be the ones who remind me that I'm unwell? I'm not stupid, I know why, but at the same time, I wish they'd stop it. Because I don't really dwell on it as much as I think they do. I think about it from time to time sure, but what I thought would be a little eccentric way of looking at my being sick has suddenly turned into my building my proverbial coffin. The even more curious thing in regard to my family is how ever-present a specter looms over me. I know why they might think about this, but I wonder why it isn't enough for me to say I'm just doing this for the sake of doing it, it has no further meaning. It is they who add some sort of gray cloud over it. And at this point, I know there isn't anything that I can do to stop them from feeling so.

And it keeps happening.

It's rather frustrating.

It's so strange that from the very beginning everyone I know has said that my being sick isn't 'the end' and that I will still live a 'normal' life. If this is true (it isn't so let's cut THAT bullshit out right now, yes?), then stop being the reminders that I won't. How selfish am I?

Alright, I know these folk's reasons for talking to me in this manner are entirely legit and valid, because all feelings are valid. Even I know this. If this is what they think, I wonder why they won't talk to me about it when I actually ask. Why aren't we allowed to discuss these gloom-doom scenarios that everyone seems to already have, including me? Frankly, perhaps before, the boy was right and I ought to outright ask what everyone what they think about my being sick whenever these things happen. I mean, it sounds a little heavy-handed in way, but at the same time, I wish at all times my folks, my best friend, my friends saw me as me first and never ever this fucking disease.

Horny Werewolf

2011-02-14T13:47:00.000-08:00

Okay, in the last three weeks something's sort of been bothering me because, well, I'm not very smart and I'm a socially awkward person.

Two summers ago, the boy and I broke up and when on the phone that night, he asked me if I had any other dating prospects. I said I didn't, I asked who does that, and afterward, I remember thinking how one has a cache of would-be boyfriends/girlfriends/partners ready and just check them off a list. I'm being facetious, sure, but when the best friend and I talked about it, she too had the same reaction.

One of the reasons why I don't date is, well, all the work in becoming to invested in a person. Call me lazy or whatever, but it's rare I come across someone I want to get to know more intimately. So when the boy said this to me then, I thought he was rather insane (what happened after, that summer, and last year cement it.).

For a number of weeks if not months, a man's been telling me he's more than interested in dating me. Full disclosure: this man is a friend of the ex's (when we were together, the boy would say his friend had a thing for me and I would brush it off and would say that his friend's friend (who's also *his* ex!) was the one who I thought had a thing for me). Anyway, after him being - I don't know what to call it, persistent? - we went out. And from the time we made plans to go out to the day itself, I thought, "Okay, I'm going into this with an open mind because, really, I've never had a man as to take me out before and it feels a little nice, and who knows what'll happen!" The date went like it did. After another week or so, I came home and discovered this man had updated his Facebook relationship status to "in a relationship".

This is what I think happened: this man, the friend of the ex's, is obviously dating or in the process of dating a number of people (at least two?), and after the disastrous events with me, things must've been going well with whoever it is he's now coupled with. Of course, because we're living in the 21st Century, I'm pretty certain I know who it is!

Late last week, the ex's friend's ex invited me out. Now, I'm not sure if I'm jumping the gun in assuming he was asking me out as in a date or not, but this is what's in my head, you see, due to recent and not-so-recent experience. Anyway, I had to turn him down because of my terrible work schedule, so nothing's come of that.

What I've come up with is that, whether I'm right or wrong, what was going on is me being in a weird sort of gay dating musical chairs kind of thing. Really, guys, were we all just waiting to be able to ask the same guy out? Is this how dating works? Have a list of potential dating ideas and just go through them like a proverbial shopping list? I am assuming a great deal here, and I am flattered to a degree (my inner slut is disappointed in no sex coming from any of this, only one round of drunken make outs and groping), but this seems really really weird. Again, when talked over with the best friend, she had the same reaction I did.

Granted, I'm not necessarily Mr. Sharp In Social Situations, but if what I'm imagining is true, it speaks volumes of this particular micro-culture, Los Angeles Gay Men. And it isn't good, in my opinion. If I am right, then...uh...it reeks of desperation to couple more than friendship or companionship. I wonder how often this happens and I'm blissfully unaware of any of it. I couldn't imagine being in a group of friends and knowing me and my friends had all dated the same person, or to the be that person. And, frankly, the idea of having several men lined up to date, whether one at a time or not, just seems so shallow and a little sad and rather ridiculous.

Two more things: when the boy and I broke up last year, I said something to him about how he wouldn't be my favorite person for a while and he said he thought we'd have sex and go to some theater thing afterward and I said I might not date as much as he but I was still hurt and his response was, "Are you calling me a slut?" And, when I went over to the ex's friend's house to watch a movie, I said to him I've never become friends with exes nor with people I've sex with because, well, I just don't and he said he's become friends with a number of people with whom he's fucked.

This is the most ridiculous blog post this year, I'm certain.

The Early Grave

2011-01-30T19:25:00.000-08:00

Even when it's a quick trip to Las Vegas, I love traveling. Whether driving or flying, and as of last year, going by train, I just like the idea of getting up early in the morning, grabbing my backpack, maybe my computer and camera, and being off into the city. Any city. In the last nearly eight years, last year what the only one that only afforded me one, maybe two quick trips. And both were lovely in their own way. But that was it. All of it, really, my fault, but it doesn't make for me stopping wanting to go...somewhere.

I just spent an inordinate amount of time looking through hotel websites and through Expedia, trying to see if I can plan a trip, and book it this coming week. I want to commit to a trip. I suppose it's the one thing that I love the most that isn't something you can touch: travel. I mentioned at the beginning of the month the same thing. And as I was exchanging messages with Derrick (hi!) on Tumblr earlier, and my ridiculous lusting after online just now, I'm all set to go...

...except that I'm not certain to where, and why, and how much. All the practical details you know.

Since he posted on his blog, Warren Ellis's COUNTDOWN TO AN EARLY GRAVE always comes to mind when I start to think about traveling. Lots of my experiences out in the world, have involved great people, some who I love greatly, some who I can no longer stand, and as I've gotten older, and my venturing out has diminished, I'm finding that I prefer to be somewhere new alone. During the traveling part. At the destination, as it's been in not-so-recent years, I tend to walk a lot, talk to more strangers in a couple of days than I think I do in an entire year, have drinks, write more, and am happy.

This is when I'm the happiest in life.

Date

2011-01-24T10:27:00.000-08:00

Just so you know, when you end up handcuffed in the back of a police car, get your shoelaces taken from you, you have to describe your tattoos to the booking cop, and then have to get a ride home from the same officer who arrested you, it was a bad date.

READ: Blue Pills by Frederik Peeters

2011-01-19T18:13:00.001-08:00

At one point in 2008, my friend Jodi and I were in Book Soup in West Hollywood. She remembered many years later I nearly got a parking ticket when we were about to leave. We were in Book Soup, just looking about, and we split up briefly at one point (it's such a rather small space, frankly), and I was at their then-new graphic novel section. there really wasn't much that grabbed my attention aside from two books, Adrian Tomine's SHORTCOMINGS (a gift for the best friend) and Frederik Peeters's BLUE PILLS.

When I was finally home, I read BLUE PILLS and I cried and cried as I read it. It's a memoir, telling Peeters's story about meeting his girlfriend Cati and her son, and how they came to be together. Cati and her son are HIV-positive, and Peeters tells us how it was that their relationship came to function, how wonderful it was, how mired in uncertainty it initially was, and how, ultimately, there wasn't necessarily anything spectacular about it. And I cried because for a very long time at that point, I was still having a lot of difficulty with my own then-recent diagnoses.

Christ.

I remember so many nights of not sleeping and thinking about it. Feeling as if I was off-limits, thinking that no one would want me, that I was broken and damaged, and that I was sentenced to an isolated life. I remember as I'm reading BLUE PILLS, when Cati tells Fred of hers and her son's infection, how he reacts, because it wasn't how nearly everyone I knew did. And it made me love him. The romantic in me made me think that even though this was a memoir, guys like Fred were only fiction. I cried because he seemed, rightly or not, hesitant but honest, and still very much willing to take the chance, you know? Ah! It all seems a little muted now, but I remember how great I felt for Cati! I wanted him to want her and he did!

And I remember when talking about Cati's son, when Fred begins to think about this child's future being forever tied to the medical system, and whose live will potentially end in sickness, I was broken apart again. Because that is how I felt, how I foresaw my life. And it didn't matter that everyone seemed terribly upbeat, including my doctor. All I saw, much like Fred, was a life forever linked to a hospital and pills. Blue pills for Cati and her son.

I think this comic did more for me at the time when I needed it the most than anyone or any other thing did. Because it wasn't talking in bullshit: it's direct and a little difficult to read through, but it gave me a glimpse at something other than what my brain had cooked up for months prior. It showed me in rather obvious way that it didn't need to be the end of anything for me, just adding a few more steps to life. And it illustrated very much how a lot of us who're HIV-positive so feel such guilt for seemingly inflicting ourselves upon others, how many mistakes lead us to where we are, and how scary it is to face the world sometimes.

This is the most important book in my life since 2008. Peeters got me. And I'm not even sure if that was his intent. But it accomplished so much for me than I think I can ever be grateful for. Perhaps you think this is all hyperbole. Whatever. I'd read other things (around this time I also read Shawn Decker's MY PET VIRUS, which in trying to talk to people about, they'd rather talk about their asshole boyfriends) and talked to several people about being HIV-positive, but everyone seemed to be either too blase, or too gloomy for me to ever get something useful out of it (I remember telling my doctor then that if "living with HIV" isn't such a big deal, why did everyone around me burst into a little chaos of tears around me). It's one of the instances in my life wherein comic books seem to have more value and truth and love and anguish and even hope than the rest of the universe has.

What I find curious now, even after just re-reading it is that one of the medications I take are blue pills.

[cross-posted everywhere.]

Partner

2011-01-11T01:41:00.000-08:00

We were talking earlier in what ifs and wouldn't it be nices, in that sort of way, and I asked if when people decide to get married or live together, if one of the things they consider is what their partner, whether wife or husband or boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, brings to that union in terms of something practical. Our ridiculous example was, of course, work and money. As in, if I didn't feel like working for, say, a week, would my partner say to me, "Of course! Take time off and I'll get paid. Don't worry about it." Is that part of it, or were we just talking crazy?

Junk Drawer

2011-01-03T12:34:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to Isis's IN THE ABSENCE OF TRUTH right now after nearly posting a whiny rant about the band breaking up. I only just now discovered this, the end of the band. Which is terrible. But I posted a clumsy bit on why I love Isis over on Flickr...

This year I'm not optimistic at all, nor even realistic. 2011 will probably suck. Already, in 2011, the DMV is winning again, my car is falling apart more, and my wallet is crying. Boo-hoo, right? Anyway:

This year I'm going to do a bit of a 365 thing again, but because I'm pretty sick of myself still, I'm telling you about things I love. Because, well, I love me already, and a lot of people need better pop culture bits in their life that don't have the words 'gaga' or 'lakers' in them. Click here, there are two already, the aforementioned Isis and writer Neil Gaiman.

On the latter, I'm trying to study Gaiman's work. Because it would be fun to dissect his comics and novels and children's books and even blog posts. And at the same time, as I begin with NEVERWHERE, I'm wondering why am I doing it aside from my secret obvious reason? I think there's an underlying thread through all of his work that says something to me about our world; even in Wall or The Dreaming there are aspects of our universe. I kick myself for not being more academic over the years. Anyway, as it is, at the very least, I get to re-read some of the best stories I've ever read anywhere.

January is only three days old and already I know it won't be the end of all the personal life bullshit from last year. "So it goes..."

I'm not prone to body image issues. Sure, I complain about the few gray hairs I have, about my belly being too big for its own good, and, man, if I was only six inches taller! but I don't really take it to the next level, you know, when you start obsessing over it (if the folk I knew would just fucking stop that already!). I took a picture and immediately deleted it last night. That's it.

Saw David O. Russell's THE FIGHTER. Which was absolutely fucking great! I would totally have added it to my list if I had six spaces in it. So, let's see, Top Ten Movies: BLACK SWAN, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, INCEPTION, NEVER LET ME GO, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD, THE FIGHTER... see? that's it! Whatever, go see it before it's out of theaters!

When Golden and I were recently on the phone, the two of us on the verge of tears for different reasons, I told her I wanted to give myself something new. I haven't traveled in a long time and I want to again. I love traveling. I love traveling alone most of all because I am better without people that way. Truth be told, the last trip I took I enjoyed the most was the alone bits in Dallas and San Diego and New York. But these places, I've been to and I want something new. I want to go to Seattle again, and Chicago, and again to Philadelphia. I never once imagined going anywhere else in the United States than these places. However, on my browser there is an open tab with a list that includes New Orleans, Austin, Cleveland, and Denver. Also, London would be lovely.

(Hm that last paragraph reminds me of Warren Ellis's COUNTDOWN TO AN EARLY GRAVE.)

I'm not sure what compelled me to jot all this down.

Better

2010-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

I'm prone to terrible moodiness. The good is GREAT! and the bad is BAD! Suppose that goes for most anyone. But as ever, the end of the year brings it all back, you know. And instead of getting rest, I'm thinking about it all, bad and good. Because why wouldn't I?

What you might not know is this is the first year in my adult life where I feel I'm ending up worse than I began, for several reasons, which you probably already know. I feel vulcanized in a way. Tenderized. Contrary to popular opinion, I think my problem is kind of give a fuck. So, good bye, 2010, you were terrible. You and your little cohorts; shouldn't be so surprising people kind of ruin everything. Good bye terrible friends, and horrible job, and money problems, and emotional immaturity, and physical ailments, and you little emergencies that fuck with me every god damned day. You're all done. Blips in history. Some of you deserve better, the rest of you can fuck off.

Here's to better.

2010: Read

2010-12-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

I used to do a top comics bit as well, but I somehow stopped buying comics over a year ago. Still, here are the books I liked the most this year. It's very difficult for me to compile the books list because, for the most part, I love most everything I read. I read everything from popular books (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was kinds of awesome, UNDER THE DOME was no), nerd books (I really wanted to put NEUROMANCER here but I bumped it for NEVER LET ME GO), and plain old literary books (THE GRAVEYARD BOOK and POINT OMEGA were astounding!). So, here it is. Honest: I think after watching the film, NEVER LET ME GO earned a rather unfair advantage, and YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? is here not just because of its content but also because of Ms. Breslin's spate of writing over at her various blog posts and her THE WAR PROJECT and THEY SHOOT PORNSTARS, DON'T THEY? Anyway:

COMING & CRYING, edited by Meaghan O'Donnell and Melissa Gira - When these ladies do a second edition of this book, I encourage you to purchase it. Keep an eye here.

SCOTT PILGRIM'S FINEST HOUR by Bryan Lee O'Malley - Can a comic book series be more perfect that SCOTT PILGRIM...? (well. actually, Y THE LAST MAN was pretty perfect too!) Not going to lie, by the time the book ended, I was teary! O'Malley does in a few pages what others at all comics companies can't do in thousands of decades-worth of pages: give us the most romantic, exciting, hilarious, heartbreaking, and relevant (to a certain generation) story. Steeped in musical and pop culture, SCOTT PILGRIM's characters meander through their lives in the same way you did in your early twenties, but in SCOTT PILGRIM'S FINEST HOUR, the titular hero learns a few things about himself, what he needs to do in order to not just rescue the woman he loves from her ex but also from herself. And along the way, basically, Scott Pilgrim discovers how flawed a man he is, he steps up his game, not only for his love, but for himself. By the end he isn't perfect, no. But him and his girl, have a chance to continue growing, together.

YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? by Susannah Breslin - I first discovered writer Susannah Breslin through a post Warren Ellis made years ago, when she ran her THE REVERSE COWGIRL blog, and I've been a fan since. This year I sound this small collection of her short fiction and it cemented why I became a fan of hers: her language. YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? is the various ways in which men are, well, bad. Whether it is the mand who ushers a midget into porn superstardom, the man who really just hates everyone and everything (the title story), the man who wonders about eating a woman, or the man prone to fornophilia. Breslin's words cut right to it, no time for niceties, and it is evident not just in her journalism nor blog writing, it's more than clear here. And that's what draws me the most to her writing, to her bits of fiction in YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? she doesn't fuck around, plain and simple. Reminds me of my initial reads of Chuck Palahniuk. And, all through this, because of her stories, I don't get the idea that Breslin doesn't like men, quite the opposite: I think she loves them, but is not naive to the social failures most of us are. If you're a man, or know a man, read this book and it'll show you maybe ought to know less men.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro - Ishiguro writes about becoming an adult with pretty sharp ear for the things adults do not tell children. Everything is ambiguous or flat-out false. Adults leave out a lot of the terrible things we all have to live through, the honestly brutal bits. NEVER LET ME GO, for me, explores these ideas but expands upon them by giving us Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth to view the world through. A sci-fi story that does more than linger on what possible future may lie ahead of us. Thematically dense, Ishiguro reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel THE ROAD: where McCarthy dealt with a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, Ishiguro shows us archetypes of boys and girls, and eventually men and women, who're raised mainly via their pop-culture (which could seem prescient always), which, at first may seem a bit of a reach, but if you remember finding things out your father, your teachers, your first girlfriend, your mother said were true but really were not, these stories will speak to you. NEVER LET ME GO seems to go far deeper than McCarthy, however, by exploring what the meaning of the soul is, and how it may be proven or not, along with showing the sheer naivetee with which we tend to approach the honest world, even when it's staring us dead in the heart. I want to point out plot bits but feel I would be ruining how much the story builds upon itself. Mark Romanek's film was also great.

GENERATION A by Douglas Coupland.

2010: See

2010-12-26T19:05:00.000-08:00

In a contradictory (to my last post) way, my movies' list nearly always consists of films from the past year. It's been a good long while since I've watched an older film that I missed or some such that had an impact on my little brain. Anyway...

Darren Aronofsky's BLACK SWAN isn't so much about ballet as it is about the high standard we hold ourselves to. A little on the nose at times, but Aronofsky manages to get you to empathize with Nina (played by Natalie Portman), who is clearly very driven and a very technically talented dancer, even as her own sense of self and her mind fracture to the point of doing herself more harm than good. The outside forces in Nina's life (her mother, her director, her would-be adversary) seem to play a huge part of her oncoming deterioration, but I think each is enhanced more and more throughout the film by Nina's own insecurities. Still, it's not that we want Nina to see what she's doing to herself and to those around her: WE want her to be perfect, even after blood's been spilled. Aronofsky's mentioned this is a companion piece to his THE WRESTLER and it is, not just as stories, but cinematically and thematically as well. Where I think BLACK SWAN excels is in the imagery Aronofsky's DP, Matthew Libatique accomplishes as Nina, finally, gets to become the Black Swan. She's perfect, of course.

David Fincher directed a script by Aaron Sorkin is all I kept hearing in regard to THE SOCIAL NETWORK for most of the year. Never having seen anything written by Sorkin, I didn't know what that meant; it was just the Facebook Movie to me. But I went due to my being a nerd fan of Fincher's since ALIEN3. And, unexpectedly, it blew my entire set of expectations away! The art direction is solid, the acting is superb (I can see why Andrew Garfield was picked as the new Spider-Man, and Jesse Eisenberg immediately was forgiven for being the poor man's Michael Cera), Fincher's direction is spectacular as usual, if not a bit more personal than in his other features (a lot of lingering shots on the solitary (mostly) Mark Zuckerberg drive home the point each time without being obvious), and, yes, the script was so fucking good! There wasn't a line in the film that felt unnecessary nor wasted. It's not just the Facebook Movie, it is the movie for this generation, trying to be more with others, to be closer to each other, but only at a distance. THE SOCIAL NETWORK isn't about what it means to be Zuckerberg or a Facebook user, but about the lengths that we might go for a vestige of attention, of admiration, of, yes, love. The internet's provided that for people who're born for the 21st century, and Sorkin and Fincher adapted THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES very well, and to say more about the current change in the pop-culture that is most of our lives.

In my eyes, Christopher Nolan can do no wrong. INCEPTION is a perfect film: it questions our way of thinking, our way of seeing our dreams, but not just our literal dreams, but the dreams we speak of when we talk about "I used to dream..." or "I dream of..." Tom Cobb and his team are thieves in dreams, stealing ideas, but now, the harder task they've accepted is inserting an idea into a man's brain: this is inception. At the core of this heist film is the constant idea that is what we dream real or not, how solid is it in our reality, do we really understand what any of it means, or is all of this completely unnecessary since in our dreams we have everything? I want to spoil the movie for you but won't. But what I will say that Nolan as writer and director is a fucking genius: he's done with practical and digital effects things that no one else has done in a long while (THE MATRIX comes to mind in technical, not story, terms), and the way in which his characters, in particular Cobb's go-to man, Arthur, played by the stellar Joseph Gordon-Levitt, seem more normal and true than they should be considering their profession. INCEPTION is the kind of movie every director should want to make: perfect.

I am a sucker for writer Alex Garland, and when I discovered his new screenplay was being directed by Mark Romanek, how could you go wrong? Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, NEVER LET ME GO, Romanek and Garland accomplished in giving me a parable for the future, what it means to grow up, what it means to raise children, and what it means when you discover, as an adult, that everything isn't as good as you're taught to believe. A story set in an alternate Earth that begs several questions about life, morality, love, death, and when it's time accept the world for what it is. Kathy (played by the spectacular Carey Mulligan) is carer, and has seen all the death for a better cause for most of her life. But in recalling how her life and her friends' lives from Hailsham to now have changed, Kathy and her friends show us what it means to be human when you're thought of (if thought of at all) as a product. Romanek broke me with Ishiguro's three main characters. I can identify with each of them, not as various stages of growing up, but as archetypes in the modern world: Ruth (Keira Knightley), a petty and jealous and torn and damaged person, who doesn't quite know what to do with herself so she becomes what she sees around her, what she thinks people will like, what she thinks people want; Tommy (Andrew Garfield), not so much the wide-eyed optimist, but he isn't very pragmatic, willing to believe what he's told, and learning the hardest possible way that the world will fuck you over; and Kathy, a stoic realist because she's seen the truth out in the world and recognizes that accepting it as it is isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I wager she finds herself a little lonely and a little cold. I know I did at the end.

I'll just say it: SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD is perhaps the best comic book movie of all time. Screw off everyone else. Directed by Edgar Wright, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD is the adaptation of the comics series by Bryan Lee O'Malley, and gives us 23 year old Scott Pilgrim's trials and tribulations through young adulthood, his flailing band, his romances, and, finally, his growth as a man, as a person. You have not see any modern movie like this, perfectly capturing what is in a black and white comic book and putting it on screen the way it should. And this movie has everything: a bad ass soundtrack, great acting (including the titular character played by Michael Cera), kick ass action, tons of heart, lots of humor, and something you'll take home with you: how do you step up your game when it comes to love, when it comes to yourself?

2010: Listen

2010-12-25T20:16:00.000-08:00

These are my favorite records and my favorite tracks of all last year. Not all of them were released this year, but as ever, each was new to me in 2010. As it turned out, if you listen to the songs below, it's a horrible sketch of 2010. I could sit here and say it's all coincidence and be truthful, but you wouldn't believe me. I don't care.

Top records:

THIS IS HAPPENING by LCD Soundsystem
THE BOXER by Kele Okereke - I've a crush on Kele Okereke, incidentally.
COSMOGRAMMA by Flying Lotus
TURNING DRAGON by Clark
WHEN PLANETS EXPLODE by Dorian Concept - Like Clark, Dorian Concept made noise the most beautifullest thing in the universe, a song at a time.

Top tracks (click to listen and improve your life!):

I CAN CHANGE by LCD Soundsystem
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED by Kele Okereke
NOSE ART by Flying Lotus.
DAILY ROUTINE by Blockhead
LOSER WINS by Atmosphere

(Incidentally, I don't think I gave the new Atmosphere a fair shake this year. I blame the boy for it. Whatevs.)

Two

2010-12-15T01:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon, my best friend and I were on the phone for a bit. We caught up on some menial work things, not-so-menial life things, and we talked about boys. One of the things that came up during conversation was how 2010 sucked. Well, I'm the one that started because it did. As I said in the previous post, wishing is for regrets, but there was something I arrived to yesterday: 2010 taught me nothing.

Maybe my little cursory glance back to the preceding year is mired in my own bitterness and hate. Who knows? I think anyone who knows me well will say I'm probably wrong. Good thing they're all sleeping. So, in our talking, I was telling Golden how there are two moments that stand out to me from 2010 that make me feel good in their own way.

The first, back in February, when we were in San Diego and he was sleeping and I walked out into an early and sleeping downtown to get coffee and juice for us. I walked out and it felt so great and glorious because I can't really recall: I was alone and there was a bit of chill and no one was about and the sun was out. And I remember very clearly walking toward a main street , making a left, and the glare from the sun coming off a building hitting me especially strong but not hurtful. I was isolated in the city. And for a few moments, before I had to head back to the hotel where he'd be waking, it was the best place I could possibly have been (a while back, I listened to Mogwai's NEW PATHS TO HELICON PT 1 and it reminded me of that).

The second was in March, when Golden was in town and we were off to meet her and Terry so see J-Live in downtown Long Beach. Ricardo and I pulled into the parking lot, I don't remember what we were talking about (probably some bullshit having to do with drinking or girls or both), but we laughed and laughed. And as mean as it sounds, I remember glancing over at a group of girls who were getting out of a car, a few of whom were dressed ridiculously for the type of show we were about to catch, and I made a ridiculous comment about how the whores are out in full force. But Ricardo didn't laugh because he saw that they were girls we knew. Oops.

Golden asked me if even the relationship taught me anything useful and I don't think it did. Neither did constant doctor issues, neither did family troubles, neither did money problems, neither did work issues. I don't recall a single good thing - even learning experience - that I can take away from 2010. At least I had that in 2009.

But this is all coming off rather depressing and emo.

It's not necessarily that 2010 was all bad, even I know this and readily admitted. But as the year comes to a close, I'm left with a feeling of "was that it?" I'm left thinking that there was no forward movement in life. There were not transformations, there was no transgression, no illumination. Maybe I'm to fucking stubborn to see it and recognize it, all of these things, but I'd gamble 2011 that I'm not wrong.

The Stage

2010-11-25T06:10:00.000-08:00

Wishing is for regrets. But, frankly, if I had one personal life-wish, it would be that I could go back to 2007 and get it out of my system. Because, as we're told over and over again, hindsight and all that noise, right? Not that everything was bad this year. It wasn't despite the job thing, the two car accident thing, the break up, the money woes, lost never to be found friends, and strangely, the second break up. Been able to keep my family afloat somewhat since the new job worked out (which hopefully will turn into something more substantial come the new year). Ironically (or not), I'm at my healthiest since 2007. I can afford to, you know, live. And my family - god love them, but they drive me crazy! - is still all intact and my nephew seems to melt my tiny snowflake of a heart every time.

But also with hindsight, I've arrived to a few things about myself that I never really considered, and it's one of the things about Corey, irritating though he can be, I really liked. In 2007, all this would've been much more useful to me (or not, who the fuck really knows?). Thing is, as recently as last week, Golden and I were talking, and I heard myself say words about Terry that I think Corey's friends or his mom probably said to him about me. Over the last couple of years, this happened a lot. And, I'll own up to it: my lack of security, my lack of openness, not just with him but my family, my lack of intimacy, my distance, my insecurity, my wavering commitment. Yes, these are all things that are true and caustic. But all of this isn't anything new. It's old news. And as I told my best friend, it's a wonder why Corey even decided I was a fair gable early this year. Again. It's a wonder why he stuck around as long as he did. Because when it was good, it was pretty much what I suppose people in a cliche sort of way call magic.

Then I get to thinking, why did I even bother. With any of it. All of it. What was it about this boy that made me do stupidly out of character things. Looking back (as I ever do), I guess I really liked being able to laugh and reflect and connect and relate to a person. He's been only the second person I've been with who was my age (everyone else has been younger, and thus, useless), and I thought he got me whatever that's supposed to mean. He was insightful and bright and fun. But, thinking about it, what was I thinking? He was also so very much unlike me, I'm not certain that it would've worked. I have talking this way because it sounds like bullshit like fate and destiny. But so removed from it - and I wondered out loud many times, to be sure - it just looks like a mess. It looks like we both went into it with great intentions and were hoping for the best. Of course, it didn't come, for either of us.

When we were at the train station to go off to San Diego, there was a little bit of an incident. We didn't know where to go to wait for our train so we went in line to ask at the info desk. When it was our turn, he asked the girl where we were supposed to be, she said to him we should just form a line there, and they'll lead us there, he asked if she could just tell him where the train would arrive, she said she didn't know until it arrived, he said she wasn't being helpful, she reiterated again to just make a line, he copped a nasty attitude said she just didn't want to tell him and he nearly stormed away. I saw the black couple a few spaces behind us just look at him in the same manner people look at someone writing a check at the supermarket for $1. I couldn't believe this had happened.

I don't mean to come off as calling him irrational, because I don't think he is, but this little bit has stuck with me all this time because, again, looking back, it was just a precursor. I should've already known what it be like. I should've known that I did not want to go through my own little conflict at the train station over and over and over again. But, I'm sure I said, Fuck it, we're off to San Diego!" And the thing is I hate stuff like that in people: getting all shitty on someone doing their job, getting a nasty ass attitude while complaining, and inconveniencing others. It's so fucking retarded but it's the fucking truth! Before, I'd joke about never dating someone who returns a gift. Getting all up on the train station girl's face because she can't (or won't, who the fuck cares) answer your question is the same.

As I'm sure it was with him, every time he brought up things I entirely disagreed with, however banal or deep they were, I couldn't believe this was the person I felt I should be with. Whether it was clothes, or God, or work, or politics, books, cartoons, marriage, food, kids, strangers, sex, television, music, family, a lot of the time I couldn't believe what I was hearing, what I saw. God knows what he thought of me. And it makes me wonder, why then did I think this was a viable option?

I think it was my weird hop that he would just relax with me. That he would stop taking everything so damn seriously. He was worried so damn much when people I don't know would announce their engagements, I just wanted him to stop. He'd complain about me spending the night, I wish he would just stop. He would talk about how beautiful everyone else was and how much he wanted to be like them, and I wanted him to stop. He worried so much about ticket sales for his show, and I just wanted him to stop. But I never said so, and he never did. It was ridiculous of me, of course, to think that this man would change so much about himself just because I wanted him to. But even then, at some points, when he gave me the out to just not be together, I recoiled at the idea of him being with someone else, and I told him I didn't want him to see anyone else. Why did I do that? Did I really think he'd change in the ways I wanted? Did I think I could do the things he wanted me to? Did I really want him and I to work out, long term? Did I even want that, period? These are the things that I think about a lot.

Funny sort of thing is, now that he decided to just be a stranger with me again, I think back to 2007 because we maybe exchanged a few emails or myspace comments that year (which don't include the ones about HIV). I think he was with someone, and I wasn't even considering anything relationshipy with anyone. But, I remember telling Golden, back then, about this internet friend I'd made. I remember saying to her I liked him because he seemed more interesting than the people I knew personally at the time. I could be mangling it, my memory is terrible. But I remember him being flirty with me in a message or two, and I remember thinking how often I was in West Hollywood and how we'd not met (we'd "known" each other for about a year then, he lives in Hollywod). But I brushed it aside. I thought he'd be a good friend to have, even just on the internet. I remember him telling me he'd call me back this one time when I actually >gasp!< called him, but he didn't, and that was fine. But, after what we've been through together, and due to each other, I think back and wish I could go back to 2007 with him. Because it was easy then, and I didn't know all these things and neither did he. We could've kept going that way for however long we would. And, I, of course, would stop thinking about what a shitty friend he turned out to be.

He's shitty because he hurt me. He set out to do so, and god damn it, it worked.

One of the last times we were out, he took me to his favorite restaurant. He was right: I hated the place. Pretentious atmosphere, douchebaggery at every corner, and a menu that did not seem at all appetizing. But we had a good walk through the art scene (kill me the fuck now!) just before, and he wanted to show me somewhere he loved. As I said, nothing looks particularly good but a Thai burger (say what?), and he always orders steak (there's a reason for that, I'm sure), and he asked me what I was going to have and I told him, and he got this odd look on his face and said, "Really?" and it made me feel like he was saying, "Really? We're at this expensive nice restaurant and you're going to have a burger?" and it made me feel, don't laugh, as if my food order wasn't good enough for him. Isn't that so fucking retarded? Waitress arrives and takes our order. Later, more than halfway through bad chicken, and his steak, he notices it's pink. He's been eating it this entire time and it's only now that he wants it cooked better. Waitress takes it back to do so three times (or was it two? Does it really matter when the piece of meat in question was the size of his thumb?) until it was good enough for him to take home.

You might think me petty, but these are the kinds of things that when I think about them make me see that I should've known better. I mean, I did. But I did it anyway.

Anyway, it isn't all his fault by a longshot. I admit it. But now, I'm just thinking, what I was trying to do. And for what, and for whom. I don't wish bad things for him, but I'm also not insane: he turned out to be girl-levels of crazy, and a bad person. Instead of thinking more like this, because I am pretty tired of myself having this bullshit conversation with my best friend (I'm sure she doesn't want to listen to me bitch, either), I'll do what I wanted him to do all that time, and just stop.

In 2007 I was younger and still believed I was indestructible.

"Everything is so fragile. There’s so much conflict, so much pain. You keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it: the dust is your life going on. If happy comes along, that weird, and unbearable delight that’s actual happy—I think you have to grab it while you can. You take what you can get. ‘cause it’s here, and then…gone."

— Joss Whedon

Drafts

2010-11-17T02:31:00.000-08:00

Here and on Tumblr, my drafts folders have grown considerably. I usually don't save anything because I write shit down and hit POST and that's the end of that. I don't edit or rewrite anything on stupid blogs because I just don't (and I'm sure it's evident considering the horrible spelling and half-thought ideas throughout. But mostly, I'm kind of sick of myself and I don't want to hear myself talk about the same stupid thing over and over again because...well, duh, right? However, I have one more post I want to write about it because I do. Was on the phone recently with Golden, and we talked for quite some time about her friend Terry, which, as ever, made me think a lot about the boy, and, seeing as how at work all I've is my brain (stupid bitch-ass brain!), I think I came up with a few things.

Ahh! But that would negate this non-post about me being tired of me.

The curious bit about the drafts folders, the bit I'm really enjoying as much if not more than unsent emails, is that I get a chance to spout on and on to my little blackened dried raising of a heart's content and feel satisfied. Just because you think something doesn't mean it gets to be on the internet immediately. Really it doesn't. You know, like THIS post.

?

2010-11-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

There's something wrong when you choose not to answer a seemingly innocuous question and suddenly you're keeping such a huge secret the person(s) asking MUST KNOW RIGHT NOW!

What's so wrong about not answering a question? The fact that it is asked is not a voucher for an answer. Is it really that important for you to know? Is what I don't want to share necessary to your daily life?

Whatever happened to some things being just mine and not for anyone else? Can I have nothing?

Read: American Gods

2010-11-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

what neil gaiman does in AMERICAN GODS is point out what traditions mean in the new world, and what happens when we try and establish new ones - or ideas of traditions without understanding the power they hold, the meaning they carry over the centuries. shadow, ever us, not understanding the reasons why he must do the things he does, comes to the conclusion that in the same way american cares not for the old gods, the old gods don't care very much for us. but it's not necessarily a toxic relationship, not so much that pure belief in them is a bad thing, but there ought to always be a questioning of their word.

AMERICAN GODS is also about the old world relinquishing its grasp on our daily existence. it's not about forsaking your history - a mighty sacrilege - but rather recognizing that time moves and so we must adapt to it. it's about the stubbornness of the old guard to realize that the old ways, simply, undeniably have no more the value they used to other than decoration, and it is also about how the young willingly make sin and call it 'new'. they revere the perverse ostentatious and maligned and cancerous like an odd badge of rebellion while not seeing that it isn't rebellion but conformity.

lastly, AMERICAN GODS is about a man who made several mistakes in his life, and who has to live with them. it is about the woman who loved him and whom he loved, and about being unable to make things right. neither one of them can. so what else is there to do? live or be dead. the latter thinks she wants to be alive again, and the former chooses death to live.

thematically, AMERICAN GODS could be the much older brother of cormac mccarthy's NO COUNTRY FOR OLD ME.

[cross-posted on facebook.]

Junk Drawer

2010-11-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

I should be sleeping: about two months into the new gig, and waking up at 3am is getting tougher. This morning I ran a little late, and by the time my lunch hour is done, so am I. I think cutting back on the caffeinated drinks is the reason. But now, it's so hot I can't sleep. Took a long cold shower, masturbated, cut my hair, and turned on the fan. I'm smoking and sipping on fat-free sugar-free milky coffee.

So, things:

* * *

A couple weeks ago, I went to my summer/fall doctor's appointment. Everything was surprisingly good: my numbers were all spot on (my doctor said my t-cell count's the highest it's been since I started seeing him in 2007), I lost somewhere between ten and twelve pounds since I last saw him, and the liver sonogram I had in the spring revealed nothing serious, but the caveat is that I've a fatty liver, which, he said, could lead to cirrhosis. Doctor said I HAVE TO EXERCISE MORE AND EAT BETTER. When he said it, I imagined it all in capital letters, yes. He's never really said anything as far as exercising nor adjusting my diet - he always said before how I was in excellent health. But I think, and he knows, that all the down time I had in the middle of the year definitely affected my body. Now, obviously, he wants me to go back to there. I've had two failed attempts at regular exercising in as many weeks, and my diet's still the same. I start, yet again, on Sunday.

* * *

Last night's med-term elections always bring up something I hate about people. Not so much the voting or lack thereof, nor even the outcome (although mr Dean Trippe does a damn good job in covering the same bases I'd in mind): it's how, suddenly, from everywhere, the day of election, everyone's about get out and vote and get out and vote, and I ask what their positions are and they really have no clue what the hell they're even voting for. What any long-term situations my arise, what outcomes in other states could have in California, or even who the fuck their district representative is. It's such mindlessness and superficiality that blows me away. I hate to say that lots of people I know personally are like that, and I'm not saying that I'm perfect by any means, but I think it's okay to say, "I don't know," every once in a while instead of pretending otherwise. James Robinson put it best in STARMAN.

* * *

Over on 405, I've been posting not-so-random songs. Because I listen to them ad nauseum because of what I described over in the previous post from two weeks ago or so, and the break up. First, the obligatory Atmosphere, FUCK YOU LUCY and Then, Smashing Pumpkins's HELLO KITTY KAT, TV On The Radio's AMBULANCE, LCD Soundsystem's I CAN CHANGE, Mikey Dread's SCHOOL GIRL, and Amanda Palmer's LEEDS UNITED. I had a conversation with Golden a couple weeks back where of course I said to her I'm not over the boy, but it's not like I want him back. I'm a weird sort of lull as far as he's concerned. My awkwardness when recently we saw each other notwithstanding, I'm not sure I even want to talk to him again. Which is so counterproductive: wish I could ask why, you know, but then I think, fuck it: I'll keep hitting REPLAY when these tracks come on.

* * *

I think I'm lonely.

* * *

Saw David Fincher's THE SOCIAL NETWORK and Mark Romanek's NEVER LET ME GO last week. Both were so abso-fucking-lutely fantastic. The former was such a machine gun spray of dialogue and story and movement and laughter and, even, a bit of sympathy. It perfectly encapsulates what this supposed generation has to offer the world, and at the same time, how they distance themselves from each other as a social norm. At the same time, for me, it put into perspective why I was the last person I knew who used Facebook and how, even now, I don't think I get it. Lastly, I think it made a pretty decent point about how everyone everywhere in your circle can know everything about you without you even knowing, and how it takes away some of few unique qualities your life may have by having it shared and diluted by your 'friends'.

NEVER LET ME GO on the other hand had me in tears throughout. Because it is about the brevity that is life and how you go through it, the span you get. Either as an icy bitch who will only realize she's a bad person at the very end, or as an idealist and optimist who's willing to put his heart on the line every time and who is willing to be willfully naive that life will always be better if only you wish hard enough, or as a realist who can see before her what life really is and all the types of people who surround her, even her friends and family, and realizing that it's not all games and ice cream, and still venturing out into the world with steady steps, a little heartbreak, courage, and lost relationships.

Next week I'll see Danny Boyle's 127 HOURS.

* * *

Still hoping to make it to Las Vegas for my birthday. Doesn't look good right now, but if I do, Golden says Chuck Ragan and Lucero will be in town then. This is where praying would come in handy if it was at all useful.

* * *

At work, my boss and her boss have briefly discussed what I might want my future to be with the company. Both will be in tomorrow. And, as I think about these small conversations, it becomes rather obvious to me that I'm overqualified for my job, and that I can do my boss's assistant's job a thousand times better than he does. Which isn't to say he's bad at it, but I know I'm better. Hopefully, as time moves toward December 3rd, I'll be able to gauge better where I want to be if there are possibilities. Because I feel older every day and I'm tired. And maybe, frankly, putting some thought into MY future is more than due. I like that everyone who can do something about work for me is talking about me in this manner. Because even though most anyone else would simply just kick back, I know it will pay off. I always know it will and then does.

* * *

Finally, this is my favorite book of the year: COMING & CRYING. It made me cry and it made me think and it made me laugh and it made me cheer and it made me nostalgic and it made me yearn and it made complete when I needed it the most.*

*it may still be available!

Last Sunday

2010-10-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

I wish you hadn't stopped to say hello and have meaningless conversation for a few minutes while he got your food to go. I wish you hadn't tapped me on the shoulder to make it a point to say how weird it was that we just ran into each other. I wish you hadn't seen me and I could've avoided having to force a handshake from whoever the fuck that was. I wish you and I hadn't had the same idea tonight. I wish you hadn't moved to hug me because you did and I did. I wish you hadn't said anything about the things I used to get excited about for you.

I wish I hadn't seen you tonight.

Of course I miss you, dummy. But I wish I hadn't seen you tonight.

Who's YOUR Friend?

2010-10-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

Does it ever happen to you as you're watching some porn, of whichever variety you like (and don't pretend you don't have a prefers porn sub-category, please), and as you're skimming through, say, a contact sheet of a particular movie, you stop, and maybe gasp, and think to yourself, "HOLYSHITFUCK IS THAT SOMEONE I KNOW?!?"?

No?

Happened last night. Twice. Of course I downloaded it...just to make sure it WASN'T anyone I knew (and it wasn't). For a moment I thought, what if it was?

Work

2010-10-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

About four weeks into the new gig, I'm coming up with a few things that seem to relate pretty much to every single job I've ever had:

I think I'm better than my bosses at what they do.
I think I'm better than my peers at what we do.
I think the youngsters at work are basically in the way.
I hate nicknames.
I am not a cheerleader.
younger Hispanic girls are a necessary distraction.
if my co-workers can't lift forty pounds, they're useless.
I rock.

Post-Breakup Breakup

2010-10-04T12:07:00.001-07:00

Last year during summer, after our first break up, he stopped talking to me. He sent me what I thought was a terribly irrational text and that was that. Just a scant minutes afterward, in West Hollywood, where I was staying for the day, he sent me another saying he'd seen me in the street but didn't want to say hello. He wished me luck or some such. Then, angry, I wrote this.

It would be months later that we finally spoke again. And he apologized for that day, for having this expectation of me, after we were broken up, that I would still do boyfriend-like things. Which, after several conversations with my best friend, I figured was the issue. Whatever. We were good after that.

Now, after the second break up, he and I have not spoken in about a month. I'm not entirely certain why that is, frankly. At this point, like before, I don't really care. Like before, we're broken up, we have about a good week of electronic communication, made plans to see each other and did, and now, after, nothing. Last thing was I sent him a text about how weird it was we hadn't spoken in a couple of days. Now, here I am. I don't even know why I sent him that. Not because I didn't want to talk to him (I did). Then, a week later, this.

Sometimes I wonder why folk bother on dating if, even when things go south, this is where it leads you after a break up. Don't fucking understand.

And I'm thinking about it because Jodi and I were walking through Naples last night and we were talking about dating and friendships and I'm thinking, suddenly perhaps, 'well, what the fuck happened or didn't happen?' Which is very unfortunate for me, of course. I mean, he's a great person to know. But what can I do? I'm not the type to run after the runaway train I must be on. Must be on, not want to be on.

And silly me for telling him that I was going to be irrational for a few days after the breakup.

Results

2010-10-03T10:15:00.001-07:00

results
Originally uploaded by javier chavez loeza

Three years ago it was late in the week. I left work early to go down to my doctor's office. This was after he'd already called me to talk about what my blood test results had revealed. And I'd gone to work for a few days between then and my appointment. I wasn't feeling particularly self-destructive, which I'm glad for considering my own prehistory with that. But I remember, afterward, sitting in my car, you know, in the doctor's office's parking lot, in silence but for the sound of traffic and the sun, looking over these papers, thinking why this had happened. Not how, but why.

Year Four

2010-09-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

I feel that dry itchy bit in the back of my throat that signals a bit of a cold. Have a headache that hasn't gone away. Physically, I'm not feeling my best (nevermind the sore muscles, the cut up hands, and the blistered and callused feet).

Three years ago, so I got a phone call.

I remember back in fall (I think) of 2008, I realized that all my bellyaching and crying and bullshitting about being sick wasn't getting me anywhere except ridiculous nights of non-sleep and lots of stress. I think I remember feeling, at various points, indestructible. But when I got sick last month while at Corey's, it wasn't so much that I felt it was one of those little emergencies, and right now, me sitting here typing this (can you get tennis elbow even when you don't play that awful tennis?), fearing that sickness again, I realize, of course, that I am not indestructible.

(Did that last sentence even make sense?)

Anyway, even though my fingers have little red cuts all over, I'm looking at tomorrow, the start of my fourth year with my little virus, and as before, it's something that I'm not necessarily not looking forward to, but rather, wondering what it'll bring me physically. I mean, I've been fortunate to be honest: after first talking with Corey and my doctor so long ago, a lot of the things that they said 'could' happen haven't happened. I've not been on the cusp of death nor hospitalized, nothing like that. I think my mind is different, sure, but better than then. All of which is good. But, yes, year four. Which seems weird to think about. It is. I'm not sure if I can describe why; my head is a little full of emotional bugs.

Even through this pre-illness right now, I had a flash that, yes, I will make it to my sixties. Is that weird? Me being overconfident? Who knows, but after a good portion of time now, it seems rather weird to think of my life in terms of a video game character's hit points. I don't know anything about the next thirty odd years, but that smile earlier today at work, my hands being all cut up, my throat being itchy, and my writing this now, I'll take it. Why not?

Stories

2010-09-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

Know what sucks? Now I've no one to talk stories with. Talk language with.

Los Angeles

2010-09-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

I like this city, where I live. It's small enough that I don't have to drive miles and miles to find something to do, or something to see. And it is large enough that I can jump in my car and go for a drive north to where it meets Carson and the BP oil refineries, or south to where, just before that final bend of PCH, I can watch a good movie before actually having to step into Orange County. I like it.

Maybe today I ought to stay in it.

My best friend is in town and she's already texted me a couple of times. My nephew is sleeping in the other room as I type this. The plan is to into Los Angeles and watch SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE UNIVERSE with her and her friend (I don't even know what to call him, even a year later), maybe have a snack or two afterward.

I'm upset and angry and sad and terribly irrational right now and I want to drive around Ocean Boulevard, into Naples, where the multimillion dollar homes are and walk through the neighborhood, see people give me curious glances. I want to drive all the way to Lakewood and Downey, scour my new working grounds and maybe have bad Chinese food from my favorite bad Chinese food place across the street from the mall and maybe even stop by and say hello to my new boss. I want to drive all the way into Wilmington, because no one ever knows where Wilmington is and try to remember what it was like walking home from school. Maybe take a side-trip into the outskirts of town, near San Pedro, where the bar from FIGHT CLUB once stood. I want to drive up the Vincent Thomas bridge and avoid all of the big-rigs and drive at the speed limit and listen to the new playlist (my first ever made on itunes); this was a favorite drive of mine. Maybe go through all of downtown Long Beach, park somewhere, have myself a good screaming and crying session before flirting with that girl behind the counter at The Library. Drive through Belmont Shore and fritter away at the sunny and crisp weather out today, wander into a shop I've never been in before but leave because I'll realize why I've never been in it before. I'll scowl at the hipsters and yuppies everywhere in their leggings and scarves even though it's still seventy degrees out. I should drive up Fourth Street, and its little bits of wanna be counterculture will amuse me and distract me with its terrible taste. I should go up and down MLK Boulevard, see if I remember where Damian used to live and see what looks I get from the homeboys as I drive my dirty as fuck and beat to shit car through their one way streets and sagging pants. And then, finally, I'll drive home. And it won't be dark out yet. It's all an illusion, all of this, imagined for my benefit and as an excuse as to why I don't want to be in Los Angeles today.

I love Los Angeles. Just not today.

Idea For A Story

2010-09-15T00:58:00.000-07:00

I'm not going into detail because I've done that enough over the last three weeks or so. Besides, what is it they say about the devil and details? What if there's no devil, however? Anyway.

It's a little late and I'm trying very hard to finish off a story that I want to send to the person who inspired it. It didn't help me very much she also said she would like me to share it once it's complete. But every time I start, discard lots of it, and start again, I seem to get a little muddled. My tiny brain keeps falling into, not automatic pilot, but cruising speed: when it comes to stories, I know what I'm good at and that's what I fall back on. Before I gave myself this exercise, I thought it would all come into place. I always think that about stories when I sit down and jot down my initial idea. Because every idea deserves to be fleshed out, there will always be a story, because every thought begs to be recorded. Of course, this isn't the case. I have files all over my desktop and my external storage with loads of snippets of things that at one point were the most important thing to me. Story wise, I mean. I never sit down and think what I want to say with it, what's its purpose, what will it mean. Because sometimes a pop song isn't just a pop song...but not everything needs more depth than a good story.

Maybe that's all I want, a good story. A pop song. Something bright and shiny that will make me want to get up and dance naked the way I've been for the last couple of hours.

So, here I am reading in the middle of the night, headset set to loud, smoking cigarettes, sitting naked at my desk, writing little bits here and there, refreshing tumblr, and wondering what it could've meant, all those stories - no, ideas - I have saved and filed away on my computers. And my fall back answer is not all of them would've been much to spent the time on. But all it could've mattered is one of them would've been something amazing. One of them would be great. Just one.

August

2010-09-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

[written last month. i wanted it to keep going because i liked it (so far) and i told myself to finish it but what with the break up and the new job and all, i don't *feel* like it anymore. but still, there a loads of good bits in it, if i do say so myself.]

Soon as I walk in, I have to duck because here come NEW AVENGERS VOLUME 7 flying at me.

She says, "Sorry, but the fucking Avengers is getting terrible!"

I say, as I pick up the book from the porch, "Is that all you've been doing all day, reading comics?"

"Yup. Jealous?"

I am and say so.

"You're home early. What, you got fired too?" she says because she's been out of work for six months and has stopped looking for a new job since the unemployment started rolling in. "Come on, change. We're going out."

"I just got home."

"Change. I'm going to change my underwear."

In my room I peel off my not a uniform/dress code slacks and polo and take off my shoes and socks. I look at myself in the full-length mirror hanging on my closet door. I need a tan. Maybe a wax. I take off my underpants. Or a serious trim? Those tattoos I got years ago, yes, they're expnading in very unflattering ways as my mid-section does. Am I loosing my hair? I must be the palest Hispanic person ever. When I suck in my gut, you can still see the lovehandles. On the floor next to my closet door is a p-air of boxers I know aren't mine. I haven't moved them since he threw them there a couple days ago. I pick them up and hold them to my face and inhale and they still smell like him. I put them on.

Later, at the bar we seem to end up when we're bored, she's on her phone talking to her boyfriend. He's some sort of musician and is on tour somewhere in the south. I wonder if the south is still The South? What kind of gigs do rappers line up in Scumbucket, Mississippi? For Tuesday afternoon there's a quite a bit of people here. It's not really a bar. More like a converted shack with a cooler of beer, a jukebox full of 1990's music, and too many stools. The city university is on spring break and these must be the kids who have nowhere else to be. You know, like home or a vacation or life. She's finally of her phone.

"I'm pretty sure he was getting a blow job while we were on the phone," she says.

I ask, "How can you tell?"

"You've seen enough porn to know what getting a blow job sounds like," she says but not at all angry nor surprised nor hurt. "He's out on tour, having a grand old time, meeting new folk and I'm stuck at home doing nothing (no offense). I'm going to get him to get a blood test done when he gets back. I don't need to get the clap from hist our groupies."

"That's just nasty. Getting a third hand venereal disease."

"Oh, as opposed to getting it first hand?" she says and we laugh. She finishes her beer and I finish mine and she goes to get us more.

I don't normally wear boxers. I wear briefs. Plain black or white briefs. He wears boxers. I'm not sure what it is when he takes off his pants, it's not like I have a weird underwear fetish, but when I see his boxers every time, it sort of melts me. Right now, however, I really wish I wasn't wearing them: I feel like my dick and balls are all over the place. I feel like I'm wearing a diaper underneath my jeans. Is this what women feel like when they're on their period and wear maxi pads? I keep wriggling and pawing at myself, I must look like I'm some sort of pervert out in public to get my jollies. How is it that these boxers can wedge themselves so far up my leg and ass that it feels like it could be a bad thong I'm wearing?

I look over at the bar and see some young black guy with long thin dreadlocks and terrible Buddy Holly-wannabe glasses and a black tee-shirt with the word OTIS on the front smile and trying to talk to her. She smiles back but doesn't seem to be saying anything. A beer in each hand, she turns to walk back to our table and the guy, get taps her on the shoulder and says something in her ear and still smiling turns to the guy and tell him to leave her the fuck alone. She sits across from me and hands me a bottle and says, "I think we're the two oldest people here." She looks around as if she thinks she can will everyone here away.

Later that night, I'm laying on top of my covers, naked, masturbating with my eyes closed and his boxers on my face and I'm inhaling as deeply as possible, thinking about the last time he was here. He's a little taller than me, and a little bit tougher looking than most guys I've ever been with. He was laying next to me here, just talking, laying on his stomach and I had my hand on his back, at the curve just above his ass, just feeling the finer hairs on my fingertips. I don't remember what I was saying but he was listening and asking questions, and with my hand working my dick furiously, it's not him naked or the sex we'd had that I'm thinking of, just him listening. Even when I jerk off, I jerk off in words.

In the morning I pick up the Avengers book and sit on the floor with my back to the couch and I start reading it. I'm sure I've read it before: months back they decided to reveal that for decades a bunch of superheroes were aliens in disguise, and they worked it out that they could bring tons of dead superheroes back because, well, they weren't themselves when they died, they were aliens. It's pure crap. Superheroes should stay dead when they die. I mean, what's the point of having tons of tension for months and huge hoopla around so and so dying if all comic book writers seem to be coming up with are stories to negate all the other ones? Continuity would be nice. She's right, Avengers suck.

First time I met her she's crying in her car in the parking lot of where I work, which is at an electronics store that's about to go under. On my lunch break, walking back to work from the sandwich shop at the other end of the lot, smoking a cigarette, and there's a black 2003 Civic with its hood a little crumpled and a primered quarter panel, there is a girl behind the wheel and she's crying. Oh, I do think that it's a little weird seeing someone crying in public without seeing a reason for it. But I often wonder whether or not these people, this girl, if they just got off a phone call that clearly went bad real quick. Did she just find out her husband was cheating on her with her sister? Did she just find out she's deathly ill? Did someone die and only now did she just find out? Did she fail all her classes? She lost her job, her kids? We all do such a great job out in the world, being little citizens who're mostly polite to each other, and mostly sane, and we go on thinking everyone else is as pleasant and happy as us. All it takes is a few tears to bring it all apart and start seeing each other as people.

I almost walk by and never again think about the girl crying in her car. But I hear music coming through the car's closed windows and she doesn't see me because she has her forehead on the wheel, sobbing away, I can see her shoulders shudder. I almost walk by but stop and knock on her window and she startles up and sees me and smiles and I smile and it's like her tears are gone.

Years later, it's morning and I've just now finishes re-reading the book she threw at the door and a couple more in the series (you know, to make sure it sucked all the way), and she sees me sitting there, nearly naked if not for his boxers. She comes out of her room, her afro all over on one side and her eyes are still a little puffy and she has her empty coffee mug in hand. She's wearing an old enormous tee-shirt that goes down mid thighs she cut up and now has no sleeves and a neckline that goes down to her stomach and her tits are half-exposed. She smiles and says, "Good morning," and goes to the kitchen and sets the coffee maker on.

Before, she lowers her window and asks me if she can help me with anything as she wipes away at her face.

"Are you okay?"

She says, "I'm fine. Sorry. Yeah, I was just sitting here..."

"Oh, I know. I'm sorry I shouldn't have bothered you, you know."

"No, it's okay. I must look like such a mess, huh? Crazy girl, crying in her car and you see me and probably think it's some terrible tragedy seeing a woman out in public like this."

I can't help it and say, "Well, pretty much, yeah."

"I'm fine. Thanks."

"Um...why are you crying?"

"It's so stupid."

"Tell me?"

"I was just driving over here to get some blank CDs and a new jump drive and this song comes on and I just couldn't help it."

"You're crying because a song came on your stereo."

"That's about it."

"A song."

"God, what a fucking spaz am I, right?"

"Which song?" I ask and her smile widens and hits play on her CD player and we listen to it in the parking lot of where I work.

She comes from the kitchen with fresh coffee for us both and sits on the couch next to me on the floor and asks me what I thought about the comics and we talk about that for a while. She thinks Luke Cage is being underused and now that he has a kid they're turning him into a cliche. I say what a cop out it is to reveal that there've been aliens in the Marvel Universe and that's the reason why so many things happened. We talk about the fucking Avengers for hours.

That first day, well, that night, she meets me outside when I get off work and asks me if I want to go to a house party somewhere in Inglewood. I say sure because why not and I get in her car and we're there in half an hour and we talk the whole way about the song and the album that made her cry earlier, and we talk about comic books, and she tells me about her boyfriend, and she asks me if I have one, and I tell her about working where I do, and she says she's been working at the same boutique since high school, and I ask about why her car looks the way it does, and she asks me how old I am, and I offer her a cigarette, and she says she doesn't know whose house we're going to, and I ask what her favorite movie is, and she asks me what I read besides comics, and we talk about what living in Lynwood (her) and living in Bellflower (me) is like, and we each say how much we'd much rather live somewhere that isn't Los Angeles, and she says she was just in Seattle for a on-tour visit to his boy friend, and I say I've not been out of town in years, and once we're off the freeway and up Hawthorne Boulevard and just off Washington Street, there's the house we're going to spend the night in, and there's people all over and they all look very sketchy in a high maintenance sort of way, and a group of girls watch as we park, all of them blonde and all of them appear to be suffering from a bad case of I'm-a-horrible-person-itis, and I say so, and she laughs, and I laugh, and she says, "Let's get the fuck out of here," and we do, and we end up talking all night in some Denny's in Culver City, and then, she drives me back just in time for my ten in the morning shift.

She's in the shower and I'm finally pulling on some jeans and a tee-shirt and we're going to the mall and try to see if we can re-live a moment of youth while exchanging those blouses she'd bought for her job even though her receipts are lost and she's worn two of them. She'll yell at the girl behind the counter, I know, until she gets her way, and when she does, we'll stop on the way home for some ice cream and probably go to the record store to look at all the music we want but can't afford, and she'll ask me what my favorite movie is.

I didn't say he should but after we had sex he saw my briefs on the floor and he put them on. He asked me whether they looked good on him and I think I sort of smiled and he didn't say anything but said he was going to wear them home.

Earlier, we were just walking through downtown Fullerton, peering into the closed shops and in the open tattoo parlors and in the overly-dramatic restaurants. Just a walk through a neighborhood neither one of us knew. Lots of college kids and Laz commented on this fact. Tough-looking Hispanic boys walking around in wife beaters holding hands with girls with way too much make up on; preppy south Orange County blond kids, looking more out of place than I think they think; no older folk, as if this town wasn't made for them. Laz says it's because of the university nearby, I say it's because this town is a hole. He laughs and his hand grazes mine and we cross the street when he sees a Batman symbol on a window and we must investigate.

A little later, we're sitting in traffic trying to get back to Bellflower. The radio is playing something I don't know and he's driving. I ask him what the music is and Laz says it's blah-blah-blah and he must see I've no idea what he's talking about and then he says if ever saw that generic comedy last summer that was number one for like month according to ticket sales, and I say I didn't. He looks at me like he's trying to figure out whether I'm making it up or not. I'm not, but that sort of stops that conversation. It takes us a half hour to move three miles. He's a frustrated, but when I told him just to take La Palma of Orangethorpe Avenue all the way down he said he'd rather do the freeway and here we are, again. He's gripping the steering wheel pretty hard.

Before Fullerton, he shows up right after I get out of the shower and I've a towel wrapped around me. At my door, he cocks his head to the right when he sees me and smiles and says hello and he's a little too adorable for his own good. He's wearing black jeans and a plaid short sleeve and a pair of sneakers that look as if they were dug out of the trash. Maybe his jeans are a little too tight for him but look at those shoulders and that chest. I mean, really, who can say not to that? He comes in and hugs me and kisses me and follows me to my room as I change. While in the bathroom shaving, I catch his reflection in the mirror as he sits on my bed and he's looking at my ass. He sees me looking at him and says how nice I look nearly-naked.

After the freeway, we're sitting at a terrible chain diner that isn't as nice as Denny's and we're having coffee and pancakes as the sun begins to set somewhere. The old lady who's our waitress keeps coming back every five minutes to check on us and always smiles and there's no one else here. Laz says there's this thing coming up at the Hollywood Bowl, something about a cast performance of some movie musical, do I want to go? I say sure and we're both being ridiculous programming our cell phones with the information. Under the table, he's tall enough that his knees are touching mine. He doesn't spoon sugar in his coffee but adds milk. He says next time he'll listen to me about driving back from Orange County; it took us three hours to get back even though it's normally a fifteen minute jaunt. He says he feels pretty gross and can he take a shower at my house and of course I say sure.

Later, after his shower, we have sex. We fuck. Something. I'm seriously wondering whether or not I should tell you the details. I mean, who doesn't love the sex details, right? Especially when the sex is good (because it was). But maybe I've already said too much already and I'm not even certain I like you yet. I'm pretty certain you don't know whether or not you even want to keep reading to find out whether or not you like me. I'm thinking if I tell you too much about Laz and I being naked together that's crossing a weird line. Like talking to your mom about something and the conversation turns into her telling you about when she was younger and was hopped up on something and having a threesome with your dad and her sister. You know, awkward. But then, I really want to tell you how Laz makes me feel and what I like about him being naked under me. I want to tell you all the noises he makes when I do this and this and this to him. I really want to tell you about the orgasms. And I really want to tell you how much I enjoy feeling him hard and wet and rigid through his clothes. But you'll see me differently. I mean, we don't know each other that well to start, but maybe I've decided you haven't earned me telling you that bit. And me telling you that I don't think you don't get to hear about it makes me think you think I'm a jackass. Such a odd dilemma between strangers. I'll say this: we have sex, we fuck. Something.

Now, he's in my underwear, looking at himself on my bathroom mirror, trying to catch how his ass looks in them, what his crotch looks like (he adjusts several times). He says it feels as if someone has his hands on his ass, holding it. He looks at me as he finally pulls on his jeans (they are, indeed, a little tight for him) and asks me what we're doing this weekend and I remind him I have to work and he says if he can come Saturday once I'm off and maybe we can watch a movie or something. Honest, I'm not sure if I even want to but I tell him, sure, why not, it'll be fun. He buttons his shirt and ties his shoelaces and I ask him why he doesn't spend the night and he says he has work in the morning and it's a long-ass drive from here back down to Venice and I say, oh, okay, and he leans over me and kisses me on the forehead and he leaves me there, naked on my bed and his boxers on my floor.

Much later, we're at the mall having ice cream and she says, "So he leaves wearing your panties?"

We're walking along somewhere in Lakewood. She wants to go to a comics shop near the college and because I've nothing better to do, I come along. The shops along the street are filled with college-age kids. Everywhere, kids. But they're not and I'm thinking about that time in the bar and I'm feeling us being the oldest people here. But they're not kids, these are adults, and suddenly my cardigan and plaid shirt make me feel like a tourist. Or a guy in his thirties trying to look like a guy in his twenties.

Another time, about a year ago, not long after I first me Laz, he has to ask me about my name. He says it's so strange that someone my age is named Horatio.

I say, "Supposedly, my mom was against it. She wanted to name after my dad's dad. Jesus-something or other. But because my dad is my dad and got his way, and because strangely enough way back when he was in college, he read Hamlet and decided his first boy would be named Horatio."

He says, "that's so ridiculous!" He laughs a little because it is pretty absurd. "But not as ridiculous as how I got my name."

I ask him and he tells me he was named after a comic book character from the early 1990's.

On the street, we stop by some Thai place and she says, "Notice there are tons more Thai restaurants everywhere now? Before it was like a treat, you know. Something you couldn't have every day. Now, you'd think Thai food was like McDonald's."

She's not wrong but what I don't point out is that she's reading the menu looking for her saitan with peanut sauce and pad thai to take home for dinner the same way folk always know they're going to get a big mac every time they're in a McDonald's.

Then, Laz says, "So, my mom was big into comic books and she saw this book at some second hand book store, a softcover collection of old British comics from Blast Magazine. She sees it and reads it at the book store - she says she couldn't afford it then. She reads it and say's it wasn't that good, that the art was pretty amateurish but the story was better than she thought it would be. But really, she liked the guy's name in it, the main character, and she said she decided when she was pregnant she would name a boy after the guy in the story. This guy, he's immortal, right? and the one thing he wants to do is die but he can't. The way my mother says it it's kind of romantic in a way, this guy, everyone and everything he's known keep dying while he keeps on living, so what's the point, you know? To me it just kind of sounds fucked up. And she likes the name so when I was born - she didn't have the problem of a husband - so she names me Laz. In the comic book, the guy's name is Lazarus Churchyard but his friends call him Laz, and she likes that better than Lazarus, you know, and so there you are: my name, Laz Churchyard Dominguez."

Of course, when he finishes his story, I laugh and he kisses me while calling me a horrible man.

There's no longer a comic book store where she thought there was one. It's a juice bar, filled with people (it's just after one in the afternoon) and I'm a little disappointed too. At the mall earlier, after our ice cream, I wondered after she mentioned the shop, if I could find a copy of that thirty-year old comic. Can I order it? But now, no, I can't find it here.

She says, "Well, we walked all this way, want a smoothie?"

Before the name conversation, months, I see Laz in Westwood, coming out of a movie theater as my sister and I are walking back to her car from dinner. I don't immediately think he's the most adorable thing on the planet the way I would in the future, but I hear his name from a girl whose arms are around his waist and she's smiling and he's smiling and this girl, she says, "Stop it, Laz!" and I knew then it was what I would name my kid if I ever had one. I didn't see him again for almost a year.

We sit after we get our smoothies. They're good. And neither one of us is saying anything, just enjoying the air conditioned air after the walk and the man who was standing behind us at the counter is getting loud enough that we can hear what he's saying to the very pretty brown girl behind the counter.

The girl behind the counter says, “But we don't sell those here, that's why.”

The customer says, “I just don't see why you can't just put this iced coffee in that blender behind you and turn it on for a few seconds?” He's holding a large clear plastic up from some generic coffee shop. Of course we're listening in.

“Uh, because we're not allowed to put milk in the blender is why.”

“God, just fucking do it. It's not like it's a big deal.”

“If it's isn't such a big deal why are you making a big deal about me not blending your milky coffee in our blender? There's a Starbucks two blocks up, go there.”

Ah, but if his glare could dismantle this little girl. He says, “Let me talk to the owner.”

“She's not here,” she says noticing the five-deep line this little asshole's helped create. “Now, I'm done talking to you and I'm going to help the young man behind you.”

He looks and five people behind him, none of them are on his side. He looks at the girl behind the counter of the juice bar and maybe he's about to curse at her but he doesn't and stomps out.

She sighs. The next customer, a pretty teenage-looking boy smiles at her. “What can I do for you?” He has beautiful fake green eyes.

Years ago, he invited me to his apartment for a beer. This is after we spent some time talking about the ridiculousness of the comics I was reading outside of a Starbucks after class. So long ago and still it's as if it's happening right now. Everything seems to always be happening at the same time in my head. Everything. Then. Now. Now, in his apartment that he shares with three other guys (only two bedrooms, one of them sleeps on the couch) and I look around and there's a futon in the main room facing a huge television set with all of the video game systems hooked up to it but no cable box. Shelves everywhere with records – vinyl – and CD's and DVD's and comic books seem to cover every available wall space. He sees me looking around and says none of it is his. Like he's embarrassed. Why did I come here?

We go to Target, after the mall, because we need some things for the house. The closest store is also a half block away from where I work and it's Thursday and I need to pick up my paycheck. We walk in and she grabs a shopping cart the size of my first car.

"Do we really need that?" I say.

"Maybe," she says, "let's see if we can fill it up."

We walk down the main aisle toward where the clothing departments are. There's a rack that looks like a broken and hobbled old skeleton with colorful swim suits and bikinis hanging off it. She stops and picks out a one-piece and holds it against me. She looks at me as if she's seriously considering getting me this and that I would seriously consider it wearing it at some point.

She says, "I like this color on you." She's serious. She drops it in our cart and we move on to where the lingerie is and she says, "I need a new bra."

We're both naked, our clothes lying on the floor, he's on top of me on the futon. He smiles down at me and his brown brown eyes don't say much other than he's about to fuck me. And I know this and I'm a little scared. But my excitement more than makes up for it. He's maybe five, eight years older than I am and I don't even know why I care about that right now, and he shifts his weight and I can feel his erect penis next to mine, wet and hot and I can maybe feel my heartbeat in it. It's all I can do to not come. He kisses me the way a car crash happens: perfunctory metal on metal scraping. There's more lust than anything else and I nearly laugh, his tongue in my mouth, when I remember my mother's sister saying I was cute now that I lost the last of the baby fat over the summer. He pulls my hair and my head tilts back and he nibbles on my neck.

In the lingerie department, she puts on bras over her shirt and whenever she does that I'm reminded she has big boobs. I always forget. None of the bras fit and all I'm thinking of is how if she wasn't here, I'd look like a perverted old man, holding these bras, lost, where I don't belong.

Afterward, in the futon, he gets up and walks to his kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for me and he asks me if I'm okay. I'm sweating and sore and exhilarated and he sits next to me and I make the mistake of asking him when I can come over again. Of course he laughs. He digs in his pants and brings out a pack of cigarettes and lights one and asks me if I want another and I'm more confused than anything else, suddenly. He's quiet for a long time and I watch him smoke, the sinew of his muscles on his skinny back look like snakes slithering underneath velvet. He gets up and pulls on his briefs, purple, maybe lavender, and not expensive and says I should get on home.

We're in the haircare aisle, and she's looking for another couple of hair picks and I'm looking for nothing. While she looks, I look over her shoulder. I see a lavender-handled hairbrush. It's pretty big and it's not the size of it that makes me reach out and grab it off the rack (there are several just like it behind it), but the color. It's unmistakable. Color memory, is that a thing that exists the way odor memory exists, transporting you to very specific time and place at the same time? I remember the very first time I saw this color. Every time I see it, I'm reminded.

Long after I walk and take bus home, after I shower and maybe there's some residual pain, I'm laying on my bed, under the covers thinking about him, whatever his name was or is, wherever he is now. Then, I'm thinking I will run into him next time and I'll want him to take me home again because I think I like him. What I know now that I didn't know then, of course. But in my bed and I'm sixteen, I touch my body everywhere he touched it, I'm trying to imagine what his touch would be feel the second time around.

We fill the cart with everything from towels to movies to baby clothes as we walk through the store. Everything is a story, a what if or a wouldn't it be nice. And it's fun making up the stories as we go because, well, why wouldn't we, right? So we leave the full cart somewhere near the greeting cards and she takes what she needs and I take what I need from it and go through the checkstand and she pays for everything and as the young girl running the register rings up the hairbrush she says to me if I forgot I shave my head and the cashier, she smiles, and I let's get out of here. And in the parking lot she asks me more about the stupid hairbrush neither of us will use and I tell my best friend a story I've not hold her before.

The walk takes only a few minutes. We drop off our bags at the car and walk to where I work so I can pick up my paycheck. It's still early afternoon and the sun is fresh and clean and there's a breeze. Maybe we're only a little quiet because stories, you know.

Where I work is a chain electronics store. Company's in it's final legs, everywhere you read in the financial pages, it says how much the economy is STILL in the shitter, almost always, you'll read something about the company I work for. It's projected it'll close by the end of next quarter.

She says as she lights a smoke, “I'll wait for you out here?”

I go inside.

After that first night out, I didn't see her until a week later. Across town, where I used to live, is where I normally get my comic books and that day, a week later, I walk in and, you know, browse. I sit in the corner, a stack from my pull box next to me, the girl at the register, I don't know her, but she was friendly enough. They keep firing everyone here and getting someone knew every few weeks. I'm flipping through the new Tara McPherson art book when she walks in. I see her but she doesn't see me just yet: Bree.

At the customer returns counter, I'm behind the counter, reading through a copy of the following week's schedule, just to make sure I'm off Sunday and I am. In the back office, as I'm waiting for my manager to give me my paycheck, one of my co-workers, Mike, he walks up and says something to me about the girl he saw me walking here with when he was outside smoking. He asks me who she is and what her deal is. I tell him to leave me alone. He laugh, calls me a fag, and says he'll see me later. My manager appears with my paycheck and he asks me who IS my friend smoking outside.

Bree sees me after I hear her ask whether or not they have the new Darth Vader one-shot.

“Hey!”

I say hello back and she sits next to me and starts flipping through the books next me.

“You know what I never liked about this new take on the Justice League?” she says, “it's how they tried for nearly a year to have the team without Batman.”

“Batman.”

“Yeah. I mean, come on, you can't have the JLA without him. It always turns out that they need him because someone comes along they supposedly can't beat, and who's the one who winds up making up the strategy for it? Batman.”

“I remember for that whole first year it was them versus really retarded supervillans like Mirror Master and – who was that guy? fucking Glorious Godfrey?”

“I know!”

“Well, when did they bring him back, like, number 14?”

“Man,” she says, “I though you knew what you were talking about! It was number 17. Remember? It was when the Joker returns.” She smiles. We become friends.

Walk back and she's sitting on the curb, typing with both hands into her phone, laughing about something she's writing. I sit next to her. I ask her for a smoke and she hands me her purse with one hand while the other keeps typing away. I get a smoke and she closes her phone and she says, “You wanna go get a beer?”

“How about some food?”

“Yeah, that too?”

“Let's go,” I say and we walk to the car.

Near Seal Beach, we're in a surf taco shack off Pacific Coast Highway, having bad American burritos and lemonade. She's typing into her open cell phone and I am reading through Facebook on mine. One of the great errors we made that is now regular behavior is sitting across from someone at a table, elbows on either side of our plates, not talking, not looking at each other, not doing much of anything in the prescense of another person, but we'd much rather look into LCD screens and see what other people, most we don't even know, are doing.

She says, “You know, it's so dumb how we're more worried – no, not worried, but, I don't know, interested in what other people do than what we're doing right now.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“Weird. How did that happen, I wonder?”

“I think it's always happened. I mean, it's probably why when you see a couple at a restaurant and they're not talking, that was their version of what we're doing now.”

Bree says, “Just imagine until it gets even more so. Man, what're we going to be doing, having lunch at a restaurant by ourselves and instead of a, say, napkin dispenser, there's going to be a computer at every table.”

“Like an office?”

“Like an office.”

“Notice neither one of us has put our phones down?” I say. And we both laugh and the waiter guy with a bad attitude shows up, asking us if we want anything else. Not need but want.

I met her current boyfriend a few times. I never really got a good sense of who he is but he's an okay guy. I mean, he's polite, kind of short, a bit attractive, and his music, if I was to guess from the few tracks I have listened to, is pretty bland. Weeks before the current tour, we're somewhere near the LACMA, off Beverly, a twenty-four hour hispter dinner joint. He's here, sitting next to Bree, I'm here, Laz on his way. The other three places are occupied by his friends, Evan, Marcus, and Melissa. I'm going to describe them:

Bree's boyfriend: aside from what I already said, he looks like a compressed version of Denzel Washington in the matter of looks: the potential of a handsome man. He's dressed in terrible loose-fitting jeans and a black tee-shirt with a blue and white skull logo on it. He doesn't have dreadlocks but a ratty mess that claim to have been dreadlocks at one point, now it looks like a demolished bird's nest. His white and blue sneakers are impeccable.

Evan is the most good looking of everyone here and incredibly nice. He's biracial, you can tell, and his hair is cropped very thinly, and is in a black polo and regular fitting jeans and black sneakers. He smiles and it reminds me of Blair Underwood when more people than just me knew who he was. He's incredibly polite and know what he's talking about. Very confident. Something clicks in my head when he and I are talking about the ridiculous proliferation of free online-only record releases. The bad thing about him is his shirt's collar is turned up. On purpose.

Marcus and Melissa are together. They're married. He's been living in California since he was thirteen but still has the trace of an English accent and has the whitest skin I've ever seen. So perfect too. He's white and has freckles and green eyes but brown hair. He's cute in an Eric Stolz kind of way, crossed with Julienne Moore. He meets us after he's done with work over at the Flynt Publications building and I fight my urge to ask him if he works on Hustler. Melissa is Evan's sister and very pretty. She doesn't wear a wedding band and has a short afro and is very curvy. Very sexy. She too meets us after her job at a law office in West Hollywood.

I tend to describe people by my ideas of what movie stars look like.

Near Seal Beach, the waiter leaves after we ask for more lemonade and the check. After he huffs and rolls his eyes as he walks away.

I say, “Did you see that asshole?”

“Who cares? Dude's just a dick.”

“I'm a dick too, but not at work.”

“Oh, I think you probably are. Dealing with jerks like us, asking for more service from the waiter.”

“Probably, you're right.”

“I don't really want to go home. It's so nice out. Do you have plans?”

I don't.

She says, “Want to go to Hollywood?”

“Sure. What's out there?”

“It's not here.”

Before, after the dinner, Laz walks me to my car and says how Bree's friends are pretty nice cool people and I say so too. We make vague plans to come back here some other time. He asks me if I want to meet him at his house and I say sure, he smiles. I ask him what he thought of Bree's boyfriend and he smiles and maybe is thinking whether or not he should tell me what he really thinks or a polite non-committal answer. I tell him to be honest.

Laz says, “I don't get why your girl is seeing that guy. He's not at all attractive, his music is terrible (yes, I had to listen to it before coming here, that's why I was late), and what's with his hair? She's much to pretty and nice for that guy.”

I point out both of them didn't talk much.

“I didn't want to talk to him. There's something off about that guy. Watch, you'll see I'm right.”

Bree and I get up to go and I pay the check with exact change. The waiter is walking in our direction, giving us a perfunctory smile and an emotionless thank you. I don't say anything to him, and we walk out, but I look back to see him pick up the money and check just to see his face get even more dour.

We're crossing Sunset when a gray SUV runs a red light and slams into a white Mercedez. All metal and rubber and scares the shit out of us.

Another time, before, but I can't remember when, Laz and I are walking down Fairfax after parking and it's the middle of the night and we're maybe hungry and whether he is or I am, Canter's is the only place that's open. No traffic. Very little. People just lingering about ever couple of blocks or so. In the distance I can hear a siren and I think it's a firetruck. We get to the diner and get seated and the waiter is a middle-aged Hispanic guy with a thick accent and we each order coffee. He's so sleepy.

On Sunset, the accident isn't as bad as it sounded. No one is hurt but the Mercedez seems like is irreplaceable. The driver is a young woman, pretty, maybe on her way to a reception because her dress is too dressy and she's completely calm. The woman driving the SUV looks like what you think a woman driving a SUV looks like: frumpy but trying to look like she's maybe fifteen, twenty years younger. She's hysterical and is sitting on the curb in front of the Pink Dot. We stand and watch, there are other people, some taking pictures with their phones and Bree says how great it is no one is hurt. There's already the honking from the intersection. I hear the siren of a police car coming.

We eat mostly in silence. A spattering of conversation about the movie and it's maybe three in the morning but I can't see the clock on the wall from where we're sitting. Long drive home. It will be the longest drive home in history, I think.

Once police and paramedics arrive we keep walking toward the old Tower Records used to be. That's the direction we're heading because I don't know why. We stop by Book Soup and keep on walking. There was a signing announcement at the front of the store. Some pornstar was going to be there to read from her autobiography at seven. Neither one of us bought anything. We're just filling time, so we walk. Bree says they reopened the old record store but it's some new company and wants to check it out. She says she read it was more like the old Virgin stores.

Afterward, we walk back the five blocks to his car. He lights up a cigarette, probably so he won't have to talk to me. And I try to hold his and when he takes mine in his, I might as well be gripping wet noodles. A homeless woman looks at us and says nothing. He smokes and I breathe I breathe it in as we walk. He sighs a lot.

There's no longer an old Tower Records building. There is a hole in the ground and two big heavy yellow metal machines on huge wheels and lots of rent-a-fence. I ask Bree what's supposed to be here but she doesn't know. She's not disappointed, and neither am I. Traffic slows more and more as the queue at the accident grows longer and longer.

He opens my door and closes it when I'm in and he flicks his cigarette away, exhaling very loudly, and when he sits behind the wheel, it's as if a cloud of cigarette smoke fills the car. He revs up and takes off and goes two blocks before he notices he forgot to switch on the headlights. He turns on his stereo and some DJ comes on talking about “obvious jazz influences” and “arrythmic time signatures” and “influenced by Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy, and more recent artists like !!! and – believe it or not – Vampire Weekend”. He doesn't change the station but raises the volume. All the way up Melrose to the 101, all I hear is the radio and his breathing. He looks so sleepy but it's not just fatigue. He's angry. He runs the last red light before the on-ramp, and it feels like car's about go airborne.

We don't walk back the way we came but walk down San Vicente to Santa Monica and there, a group of protestors are chanting something and are carrying signs I don't bother to read. A throng of people, all wearing the same white and blue tee-shirt with a cross on the back, all of them probably gay, blocking the sidewalk. There are no police and I don't really want to know what's happened that brought them out here: reactionary protest. Bree says we should maybe head back. And we do.

Up the 91, nearly home, he reaches over to hold my hand. We don't say anything until this moment when he says he's sorry about the jewelry store earlier. I say it's okay and he says it isn't. I say we can talk about it tomorrow, we both just need to get home. He says fine, and I lean over to kiss him on the cheek as he pulls onto the off-ramp, and he turns his head a little. He doesn't even slow at the yield sign and a car sideswipes us onto the sidewalk. I scream. He says, “Motherfucker!” and the car comes to a stop just seconds later, and I see the car that hit us driving off into the distance. Laz turns to me and asks me if I'm okay, am I hurt, am I okay. And I say I am and I undo my seatbelt and I look at his face and there're tears in his eyes. He's breathing very heavily. I tell him I'm okay.

We walk back and there is no longer and accident scene. As if it had never happened.

Bree says, “Wow, it's like they even swept up the broken glass and everything.”

“How do they do that that fast?”

“I don't know,” she says.

“So weird how minutes ago there was chaos and smoke and now there is nothing. No one driving through the intersection has an idea what happened.”

“Here to go."

We break up, my ex and I, and I'm visiting my older brother and his family in Seattle. Years ago, we're sitting outside his house, drinking beers, looking out into the neighborhood and looks like any other neighborhood anywhere else, and it's only a little boring. My older brother's been married for years and his wife is currently pregnant with their third child. He and I are drinking beers and talking about our father, where he is and how he's doing, and that's he's coming back into the country next summer. I ask my brother whether our dad asked about me and he says he didn't. Not as if I was expecting anything else, really.

I got into Seattle very last minute because I just didn't want to be home, obviously. There wasn't anything there for me after my ex say's he's moving in with some man he met somewhere in Long Beach whom he loves. He said he was sorry and he didn't mean for anything to happen where he'd hurt me and he didn't want me to hate him but it was a done deal and he was sorry. I listened, of course I did. I didn't say much when he was done. He stood there, at his door, he didn't even let me in. He was wearing the shorts I'd bought him the month before. Yes, I listened. And then I punched him in the face and took off the ring he'd given men not long after we started dating and throw it at his crumpled, crying, stupid face, and left. I haven't seen him since but that was only two weeks before arriving at Sea-Tac.

My older brother says, “Has he tried calling you? I mean have you talked to him?”

“He's tried, you know, but I've not answered and I don't really wanna talk to him.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Nah. He's a fucking liar, and he hurt me.”

“That's pretty petty.”

“Oh, I know,” I say. “I'm okay with that.” I laugh. “I'm having that sort of moment when I'm okay being a bad person.”

“You're too damn stubborn for your own good, you know that?”

“Am I? Probably.”

“This passive-aggressive bullshit of yours, I don't know how you do it, man. You're kind of smart and when your feelings are hurt you turn into this metal robot.”

“As opposed to a wooden robot?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.”

His cell phone rings and he talks to his wife for a few minutes. On the table before us, his pack of smokes and I take one and take a good long drag and I hate I'm thinking about how wonderful he was to me when he was there, present and fully, even when he'd be off at work and I was off at work and he'd send me inappropriate texts while he was in a meeting. He clicks off his phone.

He says, “So, I have a question.”

“Okay.”

“Don't get all offended and try to punch me in the face, okay (I mean, you know I'll kick your ass, right?)?”

I laugh, “What?”

“Okay: so who fucked who when you were together?”

“Are you really asking me this?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“I'm just curious.”

“Why?”

“Why're you avoiding the question?”

“This is so idiotic.”

“Well...?”

Now, on the drive back from Hollywood, my older brother texts me he and his family will be in town, somewhere in Orange County so they'll be able to take the kids to Disneyland. Can we get together, dinner, maybe. He and his wife want to me Bree and Laz. I text him back sure, yes.

I say, “He's the bottom most of the time, if that's what you mean.”

“So he fucks you too?”

“Yes, but not often.”

“You like it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, with girls, you know they like it.”

“Oh? How do you know?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

He rolls over and it's morning, and I'm facing his back now, the sun coming in from his windows. Not another ex, not really, but we were sleeping together. We slept together. Whatever. He rolls over, his back to me, he has an intricately ridiculous tattoo covering his back, and when I first asked him about it, he sort of smiled and said it was one of the few things he regretted in life, getting this enormous tattoo that he's had unfinished for years. By the time I met him, he said when we first began speaking to each other, he was adamant about finishing it, but by the time I slept with with him last, two years later, he never mentioned it again.

We're still on the road, Bree at the wheel, punching things into her phone while she keeps an occasional eye on the road. It's getting to be later than we thought and the idea of driving to and back from Hollywood was probably the wrong one. Her ipod is playing on random through her car's speakers and there's that Catpower song I love and maybe it's not so random because the song before was Ryan Adams's cover of Wonderwall and I want to ask her if this is a playlist. She keeps typing into her phone, traffic or no.

He rolls over, it's morning. Over his shoulder, the sunlight refracts and I've various rays of color hitting me in the face, not unpleasantly, and I hear his breathing. I feel him move slightly, myoclonic twitches from whatever he's dreaming, and this isn't the last time we sleep together but after my break up nearly a year before, it feels as if whenever I sleep with someone it will be the last time I'll sleep with that person. He isn't like that and I don't know why for month's I will sleep with him. He will kiss me in a mechanical pornographic movie sort of way – a precursor to him letting me be fucked. When he said he didn't want anything serious but fucking, I jumped at the chance because fucking is better than still pining over someone who still emails you or calls you once a week. He hurt me and now I'm hurting him and I think about last year when my older brother called me petty out on his porch.

Bree says there's a party somewhere in South Gate, do we want to go. And because I don't know why I say, yes, we do want to be there.

I turn onto my back and hear him sleep. The sun doesn't move. At that point maybe I'm thinking that I don't really dislike him, not really. I definitely don't like him. Whether he's the good thing about a bad situation, I can't say. He's sleeping while I've been awake the entire night since he pulled off the final condom and said he needed to take a shit and did and came into bed reeking of come and amyl nitrate and sweat. My sweat. And I listen to him fall asleep and I'm thinking how much I want to return all of these phone calls and emails and it hurts so much to think that I won't do it because it would mean defeat and, naturally, I think this is the most childish thing about me and I'll probably be this way for the rest of my life. I'm twenty-three, sleeping next to him, the sun in my face.

We're the first ones to show up to the house in South Gate. This is how bored we are. We arrive and open beers and there's us two and Brittany, girl whose house we're in. Even her boyrfriend isn't here. She's playing something over the stereo that reminds me of old goth music from junior high school and I ask Brittany where she went to school after high school. Brittany isn't a friend the way that Bree is my friend. She's someone we know the way you get to know the girl behind the counter at the coffee shop: routine. She and Bree worked together for about a second in a second-hand store when we were in college and Bree says she just never deleted Brittany's number from her cell phone's memory. That's how I know her. At a party off campus, then, I'm told Brittany and I made out. I don't remember that. Brittany tried to hold my hand once at a hip-hop show a year after that. This music is terrible.

Naked, I get up and sit on the toilet, waiting for something to happen. I don't close the door. Through the hallway connecting the living room and the bedrooms (his apartment is huge and has three of them), I hear noise, rustling. He's getting up.

Brittany sees me eyeing her book shelves and says most of the comics are her boyfriend's, whatever this one's name is. She has had a lot of them in the time I've known she exists. It's what I hear. Gossip. If that's the case, I say, than your boyfriend has impeccable taste. I say this because he has an original printing of Box Office Poison and Blankets. She says she doesn't read them. She doesn't get them. Brittany, she says she used to read X-Men when she was a kid and there was an X-Men cartoon show. Bree on the brown leather couch, her legs underneath her, is talking to someone on the phone, and Brittany's stereo changes from terrible music to Chuck Ragan's first record.

After a shower, finally he emerges from his bathroom, and I'm putting my clothes back on. He says he wants to go out for breakfast and do I want to come and I say thanks, but no, I ought to get home. He stands in his bathroom doorway, naked but for the towel wrapped around his waist, steam pouring from behind him. He's muscular in the same what linebackers are muscular which is tangentially. I love his chest. He crosses his very impressive arms across the aforementioned equally impressive chest and looks at me and smirks. I look at him and I think I try to smile. It's not the last time he and I will sleep together, I know this now, I didn't then, and now, here, thinking about it, it should have been, not because he was a bad person, but I was running away and I think, even then, that was what would help me more than anything else, running away into brutally meaningless fucking (not sex), instead of answering something as small and wonderful as an email that asked how I was doing and said that I was missed and that I should call him back. I didn't. I never returned any of those calls or emails.

Brittany's party, two whole hours after Bree and I arrived, is actually entertaining and fun and I'm dancing with a girl with blonde dreadlocks who said she wanted to make out with me but settled for a dance.

In my car, after I leave his apartment, I turn up the music as loud as I can stand it and peel out and never take my foot off the accelerator once I'm on the freeway. It won't be the last time he and I will sleep together, I know this now, but I didn't then, and I'm thinking about what the sunlight looked like coming through his window, over his shoulder, and how inert it made me feel. Running away.

At the party, I see him. The man with the tattooed back, whose bed I was in for a long time. He sees me. We're both older but he sees me and smiles. I smile back. It isn't shock but what a tiny universe we live in. He comes in alone and I'm still dancing with the dreadlocked girl and he sees me and recognition: years have passed since last I saw him and I see nothing of me then when he appears. I don't feel the me from before now, here, dancing, a bit sweaty. He smiles at me and I wonder why I ever though he was a good escape. One of those things to regret for the rest of my life. I dance and dance and dance and dance.

Years ago, he invited me to his apartment for a beer. This is after we spent some time talking about the ridiculousness of the comics I was reading outside of a Starbucks after class. So long ago and still it's as if it's happening right now. Everything seems to always be happening at the same time in my head. Everything. Then. Now. Now, in his apartment that he shares with three other guys (only two bedrooms, one of them sleeps on the couch) and I look around and there's a futon in the main room facing a huge television set with all of the video game systems hooked up to it but no cable box. Shelves everywhere with records – vinyl – and CD's and DVD's and comic books seem to cover every available wall space. He sees me looking around and says none of it is his. Like he's embarrassed. Why did I come here?

We go to Target, after the mall, because we need some things for the house. The closest store is also a half block away from where I work and it's Thursday and I need to pick up my paycheck. We walk in and she grabs a shopping cart the size of my first car.

"Do we really need that?" I say.

"Maybe," she says, "let's see if we can fill it up."

We walk down the main aisle toward where the clothing departments are. There's a rack that looks like a broken and hobbled old skeleton with colorful swim suits and bikinis hanging off it. She stops and picks out a one-piece and holds it against me. She looks at me as if she's seriously considering getting me this and that I would seriously consider it wearing it at some point.

She says, "I like this color on you." She's serious. She drops it in our cart and we move on to where the lingerie is and she says, "I need a new bra."

We're both naked, our clothes lying on the floor, he's on top of me on the futon. He smiles down at me and his brown brown eyes don't say much other than he's about to fuck me. And I know this and I'm a little scared. But my excitement more than makes up for it. He's maybe five, eight years older than I am and I don't even know why I care about that right now, and he shifts his weight and I can feel his erect penis next to mine, wet and hot and I can maybe feel my heartbeat in it. It's all I can do to not come. He kisses me the way a car crash happens: perfunctory metal on metal scraping. There's more lust than anything else and I nearly laugh, his tongue in my mouth, when I remember my mother's sister saying I was cute now that I lost the last of the baby fat over the summer. He pulls my hair and my head tilts back and he nibbles on my neck.

In the lingerie department, she puts on bras over her shirt and whenever she does that I'm reminded she has big boobs. I always forget. None of the bras fit and all I'm thinking of is how if she wasn't here, I'd look like a perverted old man, holding these bras, lost, where I don't belong.

Afterward, in the futon, he gets up and walks to his kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for me and he asks me if I'm okay. I'm sweating and sore and exhilarated and he sits next to me and I make the mistake of asking him when I can come over again. Of course he laughs. He digs in his pants and brings out a pack of cigarettes and lights one and asks me if I want another and I'm more confused than anything else, suddenly. He's quiet for a long time and I watch him smoke, the sinew of his muscles on his skinny back look like snakes slithering underneath velvet. He gets up and pulls on his briefs, purple, maybe lavender, and not expensive and says I should get on home.

We're in the haircare aisle, and she's looking for another couple of hair picks and I'm looking for nothing. While she looks, I look over her shoulder. I see a lavender-handled hairbrush. It's pretty big and it's not the size of it that makes me reach out and grab it off the rack (there are several just like it behind it), but the color. It's unmistakable. Color memory, is that a thing that exists the way odor memory exists, transporting you to very specific time and place at the same time? I remember the very first time I saw this color. Every time I see it, I'm reminded.

Long after I walk and take bus home, after I shower and maybe there's some residual pain, I'm laying on my bed, under the covers thinking about him, whatever his name was or is, wherever he is now. Then, I'm thinking I will run into him next time and I'll want him to take me home again because I think I like him. What I know now that I didn't know then, of course. But in my bed and I'm sixteen, I touch my body everywhere he touched it, I'm trying to imagine what his touch would be feel the second time around.

We fill the cart with everything from towels to movies to baby clothes as we walk through the store. Everything is a story, a what if or a wouldn't it be nice. And it's fun making up the stories as we go because, well, why wouldn't we, right? So we leave the full cart somewhere near the greeting cards and she takes what she needs and I take what I need from it and go through the checkstand and she pays for everything and as the young girl running the register rings up the hairbrush she says to me if I forgot I shave my head and the cashier, she smiles, and I let's get out of here. And in the parking lot she asks me more about the stupid hairbrush neither of us will use and I tell my best friend a story I've not hold her before.

Why Not?

2010-09-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

For my first day at my new job I wanted to wear this.

Not too shrewd on my part, just trying to be a little provocative given what I was expecting: a bunch of boys sitting around and talking in a warehouse environment. I figured I'd be in for a lot of overly firm handshaking and lots of half-nods in acknowledgment of each other, and probably terrible jock talk, you know, given the fact in Long Beach and Lakewood, there seems to be only one type of guy. So, I figured, what the fuck, you know, might as well make it a point to single myself our as different. Because, to be frank, I normally don't really care what my clothes says about me, but with dudes who work in a warehouse, they don't normally wear a light purple sweaters unless they're not straight. This time, I thought it might be useful and a little fun and, obviously, a way to throw some uneccessary source for gossip already, even still weeks out from our daily work days.

Turns out I couldn't wear it because I spilled coffee all over it first thing in the morning, so changed completely. Which is just as well: my first day at work wasn't what I was anticipating. And worst of all, across from me at the same table in the conference room, there was a particularly not straight Hispanic boy wearing the exact same sweater. Imagine the superfluous faux pas?! I laughed in my head when he sat down and introduced himself and I had to tell him I had the same sweater at home, and his eyes kind of opened a little wide, said, "Really?" and my not even wearing it, apparently, had a different unintended effect.

Malarkey

2010-09-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

Earlier, a few hours ago, I'm thinking how much today was, if not informative, a little fun. I like talking about things work-related when I know I've the experience and the plain old intelligence for it (I'm sure we all do, but lots of times people start talking about shit they *think* they understand). So, today was a first day for me, meeting new people, meeting new bosses. But even though I know I can work that type of room very well (it's not charisma, for certain, in any type particular game), I'm thinking about what, not so suddenly has opened up before me, what's coming. What I will be able to do. And as always, it's a matter of choice.

I'm thinking how now that something has begun, options become open, and I'm at my better informed self, the things I want to do and would like to do, these lists don't correspond very often and I was so disappointed that, as I'm thinking earlier, this was exactly that: a point where the two don't meet, want and would like to do.

(That last paragraph is atrocious, isn't it?)

And it was a tweet by photographer/editor/writer/model/style technician, Zoetica Ebb, that made me realize that there are certain things that I can not do anymore. No, not "can not" but "will not" because, certainly, it means a little bit more than I'd like. For two reasons: one, well, I wouldn't do something I normally don't like just 'for fun,' and two, I don't get to do those things anymore.

My vague and not too subtle ass needs to stop typing this malarkey.

See: Sex Positive

2010-09-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

For weeks now I've been trying to write out a proper review of the Richard Berkowitz documentary SEX POSITIVE by Daryl Wein and I've failed so many times. I think there are too many thoughts and ideas and (yes!) emotions all fighting to be heard. And even after emailing Berkowitz himself, and talking with Corey about the film, I'm sort of a little lost on the approach. So, here are the five reasons why I feel you ought to see this story:

1 - I didn't know who Richard Berkowitz was when Corey asked me last year (Corey's interview with Berkowitz at HIV Plus Magazine). And when I discovered who he was I naturally wanted to know more. Because his is a name that the greater gay (queer?) community should know and when I discovered it was wasn't, I was appalled. I couldn't imagine the same happening now. SEX POSITIVE does a great job of filling in the blank you don't know you have.

2 - SEX POSITIVE is a great examination of how one man's life was irrevocably altered by going against the standards of thee mainstream gay community. Berkowitz wasn't simply demonized and made out to be an alarmist, he was ignored and dismissed. He was basically called an enemy of the burgeoning gay community of the late 1970's/early 1980's. He wasn't supported by those he wanted to save because...he was trying to save them. It's so heartbreaking to see his story unfold for me as an HIV positive person living in the 21st century. How can any community turn its back on glaring examples of doing right?

3 - Historically, SEX POSITIVE put me in a frame of mind that I was literally too young to understand what was happening in the world. It places you in the context of Berkowitz's life and his world and via Wein's use of archival footage, it reveals the true enemies of mainstream gay culture (itself). It makes me ask myself which side of the fight I'd be on, if at all. It makes me ask myself what I would do if circumstances where so similar in my life. It begs the obvious questions of us all about personal responsibility, ignorance, and even persecution all within the subculture we belong to. It makes me counter attack those who claim are only out for what's good for me and mine.

4 - Berkowitz's story strikes me very personally because Corey and I are HIV positive, and a lot of the bargaining Berkowitz shares on screen years after the fact remind me so much of the bargaining I've done over the years in terms of having unprotected sex. SEX POSITIVE makes me reflect on how, in the 1980's, gay men like Berkowitz, even knowing they'll keep getting STDs, still engaged in bareback sex, all of which is so personally prophetic when I think over my life and how I'd realized various times that I too was exposing myself to all sorts of nasty STDs including HIV/AIDS...and I still chose to engange in unsafe sex. So smart, all of us, just not smart enough.

5 - SEX POSITIVE is a human story. One that any person can relate to I think, particularly in this present day: HIV/AIDS not being the gay disease it used to be known as. That's the trite thing to say but still, I believe it to be true. And Richard Berkowitz, like so many other people before him, stood up against those who would shut him out of his community and still screamed. Me, so far removed from that place and time, and still not, I see a man who did not lose more than he gained: he never acquiesced and didn't waver. He was his own man.

Listen: Kele Okereke

2010-09-03T23:58:00.000-07:00

Kele Okereke (live at the BBC), EVERYTHING YOU WANTED

a good pop song grabs you like a pretty face: superficial enough make you want to ask his name; attractive enough to make you maybe want to make out.

then, as you spend more time with it, a good pop song becomes more than something to dance naked with. you listen and begin to see that there’s substance there, something that surprises you because all you thought you had was a pretty face.

and as you get to know it further, it means something to you you’ll carry with you from that initial chance meeting to where now it’s comforting as a towel just out of the pool.

and it changes flavors and textures with each new person you come across. because a good pop song changes and becomes something new even though the dance beat doesn’t ever leave you.

a good pop song grows with you, with everyone. most people take pop music to be something banal and to not be listened to, just heard. but, no. a good pop song makes you dance and sing and laugh and reminisce and long and happy and tears you apart and puts you back together in a new configuration that maybe still tastes like you.

[cross-posted]

Job

2010-09-03T23:19:00.000-07:00

I'm having a little difficulty with myself.

So, in six days I'm going to my first real day of actual work. Landed a new job (finally!) that I want and I think I will be good at and will probably like. All of that went down last week, and earlier this week, while out for lunch with Ricardo, I got the call to confirm it. It was the best single moment of Tuesday, let me tell you.

So, we're driving back to my house, in Ricardo's car. And we're talking a bit and he shakes my hand and I thumb through my phone and he sees me and he kind of laughs and I know why he laughs. and I beat him to the punch and I tell him that, yes, this would be the moment...

...no.

Anyway, so I start my new job in a few days, and as we're talking, I say to Ricardo that for me it's about who you can't wait to tell things to, good and not so good. The first person you can't wait to talk to. He nods in agreement. And we get home.

I'm a cynical person, and I'm obstinate, and I'm a frightened little man.

Impossible

2010-08-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

In various ways, lots of us, we're impossible humans: we're the main impediment in our lives.

Status Symbol +

2010-08-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

Last month, Corey and I were at Highways Performance Space early in the morning, waiting for the tech/sound guy to get ready to help Corey rehearse for his show later that day. In the meanwhile, Corey and I took a brief walk through the small gallery there and saw the polaroids being featured there that month, THE FAIROAKS PROJECT: PHOTOS BY FRANK MELLENO. There were several photographs showing candid scenes at this bath house and aside from the obvious nudity and good heartedness of them, a few showed clear unprotected anal sex. Corey and I looked, he made a mention about how that culture was so integral to gay culture as a whole, but how it was how many men basically met their death that way, through unprotected sex which eventually lead to STDs including AIDS/HIV. Then, Corey and I briefly discussed whether or not the owners of such an establishment felt any sort of guilt for any of the deaths that came from that. We asked whether or not we should hold these business owners partly responsible for what happened to a lot of their patrons. Corey and I have talked about this a lot more since then. We talked about personal responsibility, and culpability, and our own experiences -- his in bath houses and mine in anonymous sex -- and how very much it seems that there will always be more of us getting infected with HIV or other STDs.

Over the years and my sketchy sexual past, I've had only one pregnancy scare, and I've had one HIV-positive blood test. Frankly, both coming rather late in my life (the former when I was 27, the latter three years ago), it could be argued I'm fortunate that way. Marginally. But until 2007, nearly all the sex I'd had since I was in my early twenties was without condoms and rather unsafe for me and whoever I was having sex with. There were several times when either men or women I slept with wanted to use condoms and I never reneged, I never argued. My own irresponsibility is that it wasn't ever me who made the choice to use condoms. I couldn't even tell you when it was that I used a condom last, how terrible is that? Probably back after that pregnancy scare, I think. This is all my own lack of personal responsibility: I'm very fortunate to have not developed something insidious through this part of my life and spread it about. And sometimes, since being aware of my own HIV infection, I wonder when I became infected for certain (I have a vague idea but only just a vague idea of it happening probably as early as late 2005/early 2006) and whether or not I had sex with anyone after that and unbeknownst to me, infecting someone else. What if I did? The possibility exists, but I don't know for sure. Anyway...

Earlier today I came across this article, discovering that a German singer had willfully engaged in unprotected sex with man several times, resulting in his own HIV infection, and was found guilty of a crime. In California (according to page thirteen of this PDF guide), it is a felony for an HIV-positive person to engage in unprotected sex with a HIV-negative person without disclosing the former's status.

All of this bringing me back to Corey's and my conversation about the owners of bath houses: do they share a certain amount of responsibility for a lot of us becoming infected, obviously gay men and men who have sex with men in particular? I don't think so. Corey and I agreed in that these people who run these places, they know what happens within the walls of their establishments, and sure, they can put out condoms for their customers, but they certainly aren't either required to enforce safe sex as a rule in their bath houses.

Personally, even though learning I was HIV-positive wasn't really an easy thing to move through, I don't believe I can blame anyone other than me. Really. I chose to have sex with lots of people without even asking about using a condom. Was it their fault? Not really. I mean, first time a man wanted to have sex bareback, I could've said no but didn't. I never made it a point to be protected because all I wanted was sex. It didn't matter. It didn't register. It was a non-issue. And to my recollection, it wasn't ever a debate. So, while not easy, my current status is pretty much my fault. Regardless of any of my sex partners's statuses, it was my choice not to engage in safe sex. Because, you see, I'm a relatively bright individual, I've always been informed, I know the whys and whats that comprise safe sex...and I still chose NOT to do it.

I've never been to a bath house, but, as I posited to Corey then, if I did, I don't believe I would believe that anyone who I fucked with there would really care about whether I was infecting them, or they me. I think it's as base as that. We simply do not care. And if the people who're engaging in the actual sex don't care, I'd imagine those taking our money to come in and use their building to fuck definitely don't care either. I can't fault them for it. I can only fault those who still do it, but even then, my own authority and responsibility stops at myself and, to a degree, my partner. I can't chastise anyone who still engages in bath house bareback sex sessions, I can offer my opinion in the discussion, but none of us can interfere in anyone else's life.

Wonder what it means when people of all ages, men and women both, continue to engage in unsafe promiscuous sex as a whole? Because, like me, we all know the risks associated with barebacking, so what does it mean that we will continue to spread diseases among ourselves so freely? I'm talking about us rational, seemingly normal, well educated, bright, informed adults, we're the ones I'm asking.

I know I'm HIV-positive, and everyone who knows me also knows. Now, what my personal responsibility is is letting those I will meet know. This HIV status is my ever-present pregnancy scare.

(most recent HIV statistics for California, Los Angeles County)

Alive

2010-08-21T01:08:00.000-07:00

We were sitting at the Beverly Center, just outside the H & M store, having coffee and talking. And as we were talking about HIV and AIDS and the lack of impactful presence and communication in the gay community, we also came up with the same lack in the minority communities, especially 'straight' communities. So, we're talking. And we reach a point, again, when we're talking about when we're old, in our sixties, and honestly I'm not remembering the details of that, but we both made the observation that us making it to our sixties (and beyond) isn't out of the realm of possibility, the likelihood of it had grown a bit slimmer. I think it was me, pointing this out.

For a lot of the first year since I first discovered my own HIV infection, my greatest fear was that I would automatically become sick, you know? I would be that sick best friend in a sitcom, in a hospital room, hooked up to machines, looking sallow and my skin would be as thin as rice paper. I spent months crying and not sleeping well because it felt as if when I would wake up the next day I'd open my eyes and I'd have a tube up my nose. My doctor, then, said this is what would happen, and I didn't want to believe him despite his experience. And now, in retrospect, as I've said to Corey before, I can sort of chuckle about it because, well, my doctor was dead on, and I, of course, am not in some hospice somewhere, immobile and dying.

But that's just it, isn't it? Corey and I have gotten into a bit of a habit of making jokes about us "having AIDS" and us "dying" and us being sick. And we laugh. I've said to him how funny it sounds to me when I say something and his response is he's dying. Maybe you have to be there. Anyway, so why do we make the jokes? I mean, we're not with one foot in the grave as they say. That's what my doctor, then, would say to me. And it's the cliche we hear that once HIV infection appears, it's not a "death sentence" but Corey and I make jokes and comments to the contrary.

So, we're talking, drinking our coffee, laughing and all, and I point out we may not reach to live our sixties. I say how the odds are against us reaching that age. I'm not dismissing the possibility that we could. It's the likelihood that I latched on to. Corey details for me some more of what he saw and heard at and HIV training workshop last Sunday, and something reminds me of something I've come to realize about me over the last three years or so. After so much fright and so much worrying in that initial year, I said to Corey, I think there's going to come a time when my illness will more than show, whether it is through the damage it'll do to my body, or if I do indeed end up in a hospital bed until the end. I've come to accept the possibility of that. I don't think I've reached any grand zenith of self-realization, but I'm trying to keep a sort of realistic perspective on it.

Corey, since the very beginning, has been the person I can talk to about being HIV positive (the phrase 'living with HIV' is so much more passive and inert and ridiculous), but it was the first time I articulated to him this thought. Yes, we can joke around about telling some social services person we need help because we have AIDS, but I'd not brought up before the idea that, yes, we could be in fact dying of AIDS. But I'm not all gloom. I mean, what I think I have allowed into my life is that the possibility for the opposite of living is present, and not in a fatalistic nor negative way. I think the realization of that is something that we shy away from. Even from when I was a kid, through the sex education classes, through college, and through the real world, I never once heard that, hey, you know, being HIV/AIDS positive raises the incidence for premature death, so, keep that in mind. Why don't we tackle that, why don't we hear that?

Look, I'm not saying we should linger on the more sinister aspects of being HIV positive, that's just unhealthy and morbid and really rather strange. But I don't think we should discount what it probably means for a lot of us. I know I'm not the only one. I think it's okay to accept, or recognize the presence of one last final emergency in our lives (hell, we all say a lot of time that we could get hit by a bus tomorrow!). I'm going to take my last pill of the day, watch a few more episodes of the same tv show on dvd I watch, and get up and clean house, and talk to my boyfriend and kiss him.

I'm alive, after all.

More Of Us

2010-07-28T17:40:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, Corey texts me about a boy who got in contact with him after seeing this picture in THE ADVOCATE (Corey's blurb is number seven in the series). This boy recently found out he was HIV positive and when he saw Corey with his doctor, something clicked in him to reach out and say what he needed to say, I suppose. Last night, we're talking about it, and I say to Corey how this kid must feel, you know, seeing someone as healthy-looking as him and reach out because of what is currently going through this kid's mind. Corey says that it's happened to him before, several times. At one point last night, I naturally recall what it was like when I first found out what it was like when I first found out I was HIV positive. Then, about three years ago, I'd known Corey for about a year and only online (we'd started communicating via myspace because I really liked his writing there). Below is the email I sent him then:

From: Javier
Date: Oct 5, 2007 11:46 AM

hi corey...

i find it a little weird i'm writing you this email; we've not met and know of the other online. this is the twenty-first century, i guess.

i know you read some of the things i post on here and you've emailed me about a few as i have about yours, randomly, so i hope this doesn't come off rude or in appropriate but i need some advice, and really, i hope you can offer me some because i'm a little lost.

two weeks ago i went to the doctor about something i thought was serious but turned out not to be. a week ago today, my doctor calls me and tells me my blood tests show i'm hiv positive. went through a lot emotionally and mentally over the last seven days, and my initial visit with my infectious disease doctor this week's calmed me down a lot. but i still find myself constantly thinking about it, driving myself crazy when there is no need. just returned from another blood test, and i'm sitting here, trying to read the paper and i can't.

maybe it's not really advice i want or need. but, i guess, what i really want to ask is how did you get over this initial shock? how do you reconcile the news with your everyday life? my friends are a great and all (and i've yet to talk to my family about this), but lots of times i just feel like i'm bothering them (i don't know if this is the right word) with all of this.

any advice is welcomed. as i mentioned earlier, hope this isn't inappropriate in any way, but i'm kind of feeling a little lost right now. hope you're doing well, writing lots, and enjoying this nice friday. thank you for your time reading this.

j.

Last night, Corey says the kid who reached out to him, I'll call him W. And I'm re-reading these emails from long ago and wondering if right now, somewhere in Oklahoma, there is a kid who's feeling just like I felt in October 2007. Of course there is. After I found out my diagnosis, I began keeping a blog for that here and I began posting pictures on flickr as well.
Also, last night, while about to call Corey on the phone, I got a direct message on twitter that said (sic, to be sure): "so i know this is completley random but I was going thru ur tweets, and pics on flickr and was wondering howd you tell ya mom about ya status". It came from a flickr and twitter and facebook 'friend' who I don't know (I'll call him D). We've exchanged comments on pictures I think, and a couple of tweets, but that's it. So, I answered and got back on the phone with Corey. But later that night, as he answered me back and I got a better idea of why this boy was reaching out to me (a latter direct message says, "...ya pics kinda let me know im not the only 1 in a relationship so its reassuring. yall like a hallmark card"), I began to think more as Corey and I had said earlier of the impetus we get to reach out to strangers in regard to something so life-altering.

Corey and I were talking last night and came up with that in this circumstance all we can do is be ourselves and be honest with these kids, which is what Corey was for me years ago. Corey even went further and said that there really wasn't anything that we could say that was the wrong thing and I agree with him. All things considered, after finding out you're HIV positive, what could another positive person say to you that he shouldn't? And I thought a little more on it when Corey said that me, now being the one someone reached out to, could be seen as becoming part of something bigger. And I think that was the feeling I got after I exchanged messages with D. As we talked, I pointed out to Corey that W and D both had not revealed their statuses to more than a couple of people (parents, and boyfriend & best friend, respectively) and us individually, and this, in turn, made me dig out the email I posted above because, well, the case was the same for me then. I wonder if Corey's was as well.

One of the most striking things that we came up with in conversation last night was how it simply keeps on happening: Corey said how at a recent performance he attended, a performer said in his piece how exes revealing their new-found HIV positive statuses showed him how it felt as if it were still 1983 at the height od the AIDS/HIV epidemic, and Corey and I did not disagree with that sentiment. I made the observation to Corey how I think I'm a bright guy, you know, and pretty decent, but still I got infected. Likewise, I said, Corey did also. A little chuckle between us both, but it's pretty much true: never once in my life did I ever think I'd sit here, typing away about this, but I am because of the choices I made or didn't make along the way. For me, until 2007, having sex was something I did to pass the time while intoxicated or bored. It's never really been the most important thing in my life, but when I was in it, I never considered the risks of unprotected vaginal or anal or even oral sex. I was an adult making dubious choices and when I was thirty, well, I discovered this bug in my blood. And I remember being so shocked then, obviously, but objective hindsight tells me, "Fuck, Javier, what the hell did you think would happen?"

Honestly, I think had anyone I knew at the time said to me to protect myself and avoid multiple sex partners and all that I wouldn't have listened anyway. It's the arrogance of the human being. And, even now, I don't fault anyone for anything because I made the choice to have some man fuck me bareback when I knew all the consequences it entailed. And of course it's a little late for blame-gaming. Curiously, I still believe it's a matter of choice with us adults, who we have sex with and how, and the greater responsibility is for oneself and not count on others to look out for us. So paradoxical, this, since I want folk to be safe, but am not so forceful in that belief.

So: W and D are part of this whole of us HIV positive men of color. I'm not out to castigate and chastise but to listen and hopefully help. Because I remember exactly how each of these two boys are feeling right now. I remember how it felt to hit the send button in that email to a stranger of whom one of the things I knew was his HIV status. Because then, like W and D, all I wanted was someone to listen to me and tell me something. Anything. And like W and D and Corey and I, there will unfortunately always be more and more of us who need US.

Of course, we will always be here.

On!

2010-07-27T00:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Corey had his one-man show debut at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. He talked about himself and God and Love (I'm not sure if he meant to be heard as capitalized Love but probably), and the interconnectedness of everything, and sex, and sexuality, and even the television show DYNASTY. For those of us who know him, aside from the obvious affection, I think it was a bit more of insight into the man than I think we might have known. I know it was for me. And at the same time, personally, I find the way he thinks and feels and believes about the world a little fascinating, so seeing it performed in such a lyrical way and with such humor, and in such an occasionally brutal way, it has a bit more resonance. There was a part in his script where he went through a list of five (six?) men who've shown him different types of love and/or how to love, and I wasn't sure how it might play out, and he pulled it off (which, I think could be an entire show in itself with some development)! I'm very glad I was there to see it, all of it, from beginning to end.

For as long as I've known him personally, Corey's always talked about having his performance stand on its own without being integrated into anyone else's work, or as a part of a whole. And this was a great way for him to do this with, really, minimal risk. It was such an unreal trip for me, the entire process, along with a bit of artistic, if not professional jealousy.

A few weeks ago, while I lay on his bed, Corey ran through a few of his lines for me a couple of times. The first as rote memorization, and the second with such emotion and passion and flair, I was definitely interested to see the remaining of his script performed. I was very impressed then, and also yesterday when I saw the whole thing materialize. It's one of the things I've always been curious about Corey, seeing him do his thing, what he loves and is passionate about. And from the initial invitation he received to perform his work to the very last applause yesterday at the theater, it was all such a wonderful experience for me as a tourist in the indie theater community. It really is remarkable to see how creative folk work, you know. It's that idea of seeing how Corey went from idea to show, and that was very impressive for me to witness.

Not until his friend Kacy said so afterward did I think a post-show discussion would've been rather interesting, but I may be biased.

Aside from the practical aspects of the work, what did I see and hear and feel? I saw lots of courage and sadness and happiness. I felt a little uncomfortable and teary and joyful. It's very rare that anyone I know who's creative in any capacity affect me in various ways with their work, and even at the very beginning, when Corey was first talking to me about it and I wasn't sure how it would work, but Corey managed it. I'd like to think that I'm pretty objective. I also have said to him I don't think I'm the audience for his work (he's said otherwise). But it's the special skill of a performance to penetrate even those of us who're mostly rebar and stone. The deeper spiritual themes in his piece notwithstanding, I'm very happy to see all of this happen to Corey because he made it happen. At no point did he ever stop to think he wouldn't do it, or wasn't capable of doing it. Even at his hardest point, I don't think that ever crossed his mind. And that is one of the most astonishing things about Corey that I've seen so far.

Slanted & Enchanted

2010-07-17T03:59:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have said to me over the years that things in life happen for a reason. Things must happen in a certain patterned way for life to revolve as it should. Most of these people are probably rather insane. I know of two who aren't, and the reason why I think they aren't insane is because there is an odd type of logic as we talk about certain things. One of them is my best friend and we had a long telephone conversation today. The other is my boyfriend, Corey.

Recently, I told Corey how everything I was reading or watching contained the name Didi. Watched Don Roos's excellent first film THE OPPOSITE OF SEX and in it Didi is the central terrible harridan of a lead character portrayed by Christina Ricci. As I was reading Don DeLillo's COSMOPOLIS, Erick Parker's art dealer lover is named Didi: an older woman who makes time for her young lover because he is more fascinating to her than attractive. Then, Corey lent me his copy of DRAWING BLOOD by Poppy Z Brite wherein Trevor Black's younger brother's nickname is Didi, but he dies at the beginning of the story so there isn't very much there about him anyway. In brief conversation over this with Corey, as he does when I talk to him about lots of things, he pointed out the very different outlets by very different creators about very different things all seemed to have found their way into my current state and obviously something clicked in me. I said, as I often do, it's just coincidence. Corey said to me that's several very specific coincidences. He may've laughed at that point.

Didi is Cynthia's nickname. Cynthia is a girl I think I know.

Late last winter, I realized that the girl from fall 2006 wasn't even around anymore. In various capacities. I'd lost the closest friend I'd made since moving back to California. Previously, of course as I found out, she stayed away from me for the very retarded reason that her boyfriend was feeling a bit insecure with me in the picture. And last winter, as she started seeing someone else, it got to be a very familiar scene. I'm leaving out the few tough talks she had with me and I with her about our rather strange dynamic. Keep in mind also that I'm leaving out a nearly ten year age difference. I've written before that it simply feels as if I was wrong in choosing this person as my friend. In a very unfair and selfish and irrational way, had I known what would happen, I wouldn't have pursued anything beyond a working relationship with her. So strange that folk that you're not romantically or familially (sic) linked to can hurt you.

Not everything has been bad. In fact, we've had lots of terribly great times. Great talks. Experiences. And even when I've been at my worst, I've managed to get a smile from her and vice versa. Ah, but we that could make things different, would be even?

So, all of these signs as Corey might say, right? I've not spoken to her in months. Over the last year, since a last trip out to Las Vegas, I've maybe seen her five different times? We live fifteen minutes apart. She goes to school five minutes away. It makes me wonder if she, like me, thinks that I'm not a very good friend. I wonder whether or not she thinks I'm not worth the effort as a person. Perhaps she's too much involved with whoever her current boyfriend is to not include me. Here I am going on and on, sort of putting the onus of our fractured relationship on her shoulders, I'm forgetting to burden my share of it. I do that. I wouldn't mind hearing it. But I won't.

In a similar way to how Corey and I were talking about her then, I had a brief conversation about her with Golden the other day. Maturity and age and friendship were themes, and in the middle of it I remembered something Corey said to me a few months back about when folk get married, each individual's friends fall into the background or disappear. I wonder whether it's that, you know, if it's what Corey said in a way. Do some people function this way? I know I do not and will not.

As recently as this week, Corey's had a conversation with an old friend with whom he had a really strong friendship which ended, not unsurprisingly, over a "misunderstanding." As he and I were texting about that late last night, it brought back to the forefront what I'd written weeks ago about my own old friend. Still, didn't finish those thoughts. But here I am writing all this histrionic melodramatic drivel instead, aren't I? This is why: Corey's having a one-man show in about a week and he sent out a Facebook even invite over it and I forwarded it to the people who I know who live in southern California, Cynthia being one of those on that very short list. This afternoon, Corey says she'd accepted the invite to go to his show. They've never met, and she and I have not had a friendly conversation in quite some time. Corey said to me it could be a sign that she wants to reconnect. Golden intimated the same thing. And as before I am skeptical.

But that's all I get.

Anyway, this rant is over. Or is it an observation?

Round Two

2010-07-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went for my second doctor's appointment for 2010. Honestly, it seems as if it was only a few weeks ago, not months, that I was there, imagining how far away July was. It was February then.

So, I talk to my doctor about the loss of my job, and the aches in my knees. He talks to me about a couple of things that I wasn't so much expecting...well, one I knew. I gained a substantial amount of weight since last I saw him. That's a given. Something that I see while trying to run, and daily in the mirror. The other thing isn't so easy to tell because I feel perfectly okay. My doctor says my cholesterol's climbed somewhat, not alarmingly, but enough that he suggests eating better. And he says my liver seems to be working a little more than normal. He says it could be my body's way of fighting the weight gain, and it's affecting the my liver. He asks me whether or not I've been taking pain medication regularly and he asks me whether or not I've been drinking regularly, even if not to excess. Everything answered, he says it's nothing to really be concerned with, but he'd still rather see what's going on with my liver so he says he'll schedule a liver sonogram just to see what's going on.

Of course, the way my brain works - and, honestly, the way it seems to go with doctors and me - I'm already waiting to hear about some liver damage. Perhaps something a bit more substantial? And even though I am not prone to weird delusions or hypochondria, I've this feeling that, well, something else is going to come up, whether serious or not. My joke and my older brother's is that, what if all those years of heavy boozing are now showing themselves, now that I'm sick and gained weight and have severely cut in my physical activities. It's a joke, did I say?

It wouldn't be surprising if it was *something*. I really hope there isn't anything further to be made of this that can't be resolved by better diet and more exercise. Nevermind physically, but the way things this second quarter of 2010 have been, I don't think I could take more emotionally.

* * *

Finished watching Spike Lee's 25th HOUR just now. Perfect film based off a perfect novel. Perfectly cast and acted, the script is particularly brilliant (David Benioff wrote both, the source novel and screenplay), and the direction and cinematography are also perfect. The thing I like the least about it is Terence Blanchard's score, not that it is bad, but perhaps a bit too melodramatic for the movie. Anyway, perfect...

What Is...?

2010-07-04T22:55:00.001-07:00

...hot?

...inunderstandable?

...important?

Run

2010-06-28T04:25:00.000-07:00

I don't want to come off as one of those assholes who find some strange sense of worth in saying out into the world that I never ask for anything (which I don't) so I won't. I'm a different sort of asshole. But in a strange, if not unexpected, turn of events, it's becoming increasingly difficult to put on that I'm fine and everything will be okay attitude when I wake up in the morning. Look, I think I'm a pretty realistic person, I really think I am, and perhaps that's where my naivetee comes from, my lack of maturity, my weirdly romantic notions about the world and life and people (which now sounds oxymoronic), so, realistically, I'm wondering how much longer this will all keep up.

Over the last three weeks, I've built up from walking to jogging 1-2 miles near daily (six days straight, on and off the others) because I've this need for something that is mine, you know. And counting on anything or anyone for it seems awfully difficult. My inbox and voicemail stay empty day in and day out and that gets to be really difficult to deal with given my family's and my situations. That's a huge piece I'm missing, really, daily work. The drudgery most working class folk complain about daily, I miss it. I accomplish things daily at work, frustrating as that may be. So, I run instead. If I could run for ten hours daily five days a week, really. But, please, that doesn't pay the bills.

When I talk to Corey, when I talk to my family, when I talk to my best friend, what can I say, this is a big part of it for me. Perhaps as Corey's intimated in the past, I am one of those people who define themselves by their work. It's become my life and without it, without that sort of structure and discipline, nearly everything else in me stops working properly. You see, it's happen a few times before. Details notwithstanding, I've been here before.

This is all the practical stuff. What's not necessarily the most important in life. But it makes life happen. Let's be real.

So fine, I just lay in bed trying to sleep, worrying about all this fucking bullshit, trying to ignore the slight pain in my knee, and I can't, and I fire up this computer, do some online looking and fill out more and more forms and at the end of each, after hitting the submit button, I think, foolishly, maybe futilely, this one will be it.

Anyway, a little venting and a little me cowering in some corner time is allowed I think. I'm all for a good attitude and all but I'm not made of stone. But while all of this happens, good and bad, I'm going for a quick run.

Good morning.

"I struggled to love and provide. How many of you know the true and bitter force of that simple word provide?"
- Don DeLillo, COSMOPOLIS

Hurt Yourself.

2010-06-23T01:28:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago I wrote about my then-recent experiences at a couple restaurants. Corey's been having a go at some UPS customer service issues as recent as yesterday, but the issue is months old (I never buy anything online: I like going to stores and I have zero concern over shipping/delivery issues). And we're talking about customer service yet again and when it is absolutely abhorrent and when customers are plainly wrong.

As it happens, it seems this keeps popping up everywhere I read. A rant over at the New York times is the type of rant I like, from another customer no less, instead of employees of the place in question. Which Caitlin Kelly (who I normally don't read at TRUE/SLANT but saw the headline) then decided to comment on, and in her post's comments as well are examples of what can be argued to be self-righteous retail/customer service folk who're simply bitching about doing their job. The there's over at THE CONSUMERIST this little gem of stupidity by all parties, and the comments again reveal a few interesting tidbits (for me, how many folk seemed to think demanding something for free is ridiculous). Lastly, through FARK, I found this one, which, really, is my favorite, even with the ambiguous details.

I remember the worst of my experiences from years ago, when I worked at Target in Culver City: closing shift and another manager and I were closing --Lesley was his name -- and a customer was pitching a fit over not being able to return a bunch of unopened movies. At the time the policy was no electronics and movies and video games are returnable/exchangeable without receipt which he didn't have. Of course, I come over and reiterate that I won't return them and this man gets so irate he begins yelling he doesn't want them and they're new and why can't I take them back or exchange them. He says it's not about the money, that he has money, and he takes out an impressive wad of cash and begins to tear apart a little kiosk we used to have at the returns area. Lesley comes over after being called by one of the girls there (I wonder how scared they were? I wasn't at all calm myself). The man calls me racist because he's black and I just don't want to do it. Lesley, who's black, re-states our position. The guy knocks over the kiosk and yells that he's going to fuck us up as soon as we close, grabs his stuff and leaves. Eh.

So who is right? At what point is one's actions unreasonable? Were we wrong? Was he? What is it?

It's easy for me to bitch about customers left and right, and about folk who've served me poorly, and folk who're indifferent to their jobs and by extension, me as the customer. I think we've all had both good and bad experiences and the ones that're bad stick, that's customer service 101.

Of course, I think I'm right in my story. But then, I usually think I'm right.

One of the curious bits I find is what makes folk who're working so useless sometimes it's nearly painful. If I can, I avoid asking anyone anywhere anything unless I'm 100% stumped because I know what it's like being some kid with no training and passion for it. I usually don't go anywhere except restaurants for good service. I mean, let's keep some perspective. And usually, when I've had to deal with people in customer service, it's been positive except in restaurants. Why is there that difference for me? When I worked at Starbucks, that's when I got the worst customers, wanting stuff for free because they didn't like it, because they ordered wrong, because they wanted to return prepared food. And I don't think they were bad customers because they wanted to return anything but because it felt as if they were owed something because of a mistake they made.

I remember getting a call from my district manager at Michaels because customers were 'overcharged' and my boss wanted me to fix it (which is of course lingo for he didn't want more calls), and I did when the customers came in because I was told to. However, when left up to me, I had it on good authority, and the state department of weights and measures's authority, that I was doing my job when everything came up the right price. But that's not the point, one-upping each other, who's right when the customer is wrong? And then, what's a valid complaint? Customers should not hear curse words ever. Neither should employees. So who's right?

As a customer, I hate it when folk ahead of me in line are terrible to the cashier for two reasons, I'm being inconvenienced and their abusiveness. As an employee, I hate co-workers who simply hate their job and do it half-assed. I've told customers to leave my store or I'll call the police and escort them out, and I've fired employees for being useless to customers and me.

My biggest gripe about all this is pretty much shown in every article I've linked here: customer entitlement. Entitlement to goods or services or abuse. What is wrong with us that we feel some odd sense that we come first even when we're wrong? Where the reason and the common sense and plain courtesy anymore?

Of course, I'm going to end with the idea that expecting my waiter to come and offer me more coffee more than twice isn't unreasonable. It's his fucking job.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

2010-06-18T03:18:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly ten years since the last proper Godspeed You! Black Emperor record (the verily beautiful YANQUI U.X.O.), and two years back, seemingly, there'd be no more. Really, a terrible situation if you're a music fan the way I am (I'm more of a nerd I guess). Tonight, while unable to sleep yet again, this.

Listen: EAST HASTINGS, ROCKETS FALL ON ROCKET FALLS.

Now: who's taking me when they return to the USA?

Number Five With A Bullet

2010-06-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

After erroneously asking someone who their favorite movie director is, and getting in return the, "So, like, what's my favorite movie?" answer, and exchanging a couple of tweets with Corey about it, it made me think of those lists I have, that I believe(d) we all have.

TOP FIVE FILM DIRECTORS

Christopher Nolan (MEMENTO, INSOMNIA, BATMAN BEGINS, THE PRESTIGE, THE DARK KNIGHT)
Darren Aronofsky (PI, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE FOUNTAIN, THE WRESTLER)
Michel Gondry (HUMAN NATURE, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, BE KIND REWIND)
David Fincher (FIGHT CLUB, ALIEN 3, SE7EN, PANIC ROOM, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, ZODIAC (the latter is far better than I think he's given credit for))
Alfonso Cuaron (GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, CHILDREN OF MEN, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN)

TOP FIVE MOVIES

Fight Club
American Psycho
High Fidelity
Requiem For A Dream
Star Wars (1977-1983)

TOP FIVE RECORDS

Nine Inch Nails, THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
Tori Amos, BOYS FOR PELE
Joy Division, HEART AND SOUL (boxed set)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, f#a#[infinity]
Atmosphere, YOU CAN'T IMAGINE HOW MUCH FUN WE'RE HAVING

TOP FIVE BANDS/MUSICIANS

Joy Division
Nine Inch Nails
Atmosphere
Deftones
Godspeed You! Black Emperor

TOP FIVE SONGS (click here to listen)

Joy Division, DIGITAL (curious it was their and Factory Records's first release)
Nine Inch Nails, GAVE UP (from the BROKEN EP)
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, (I'LL LOVE YOU) UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (from the soundtrack to Wim Wenders's film UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD)
Kurtis Blow, THE BREAKS
DJ SHadow, YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

TOP FIVE WRITERS

Chuck Palahniuk
Douglas Coupland
Bret Easton Ellis
Grant Morrison
Warren Ellis

TOP FIVE BOOKS

Chuck Palahniuk, FIGHT CLUB
Douglas Coupland, MS. WYOMING
Bret Easton Ellis, AMERICAN PSYCHO
Nick Hornby, HIGH FIDELITY
Alex Garland, THE BEACH

TOP FIVE COMICS

Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, WATCHMEN
Grant Morrison & Chris Weston, THE FILTH
Warren Ellis & D'Israeli, LAZARUS CHURCHYARD
Warren Ellis & Darrick Robertson, TRANSMETROPOLITAN
Neil Gaiman et al., THE SANDMAN

Present

2010-06-01T23:40:00.000-07:00

Down in the dumps, earlier this afternoon, I meet up with Ricardo at the book store. This after a bunch of terrible legal hoopla and my car not starting and personal ambiguity. And, I don't know, my first instinct is not to leave the house. If I could've, then, as I read his text message asking me to meet him, I would've boarded up the house and sectioned off a part of the house that would leave me and my book cloistered for a good long while. Not a good day, you see, in every facet I could think of.

My best friend calls me after her two hour-plus job interview and as we're looking through the graphic novel section (Ricardo got the SCOTT PILGRIM 3-pack) at the book store and my cell phone's maybe about to die but it isn't for the tons of ringing it's making.

Afterward, Ricardo and I exchange a few little bits of life stories and I'm reminded of how very little I know about everyone I know. I mean, what's going on, what's happened, who's doing what now, what's upcoming. I don't really know a lot and, really, it's all due to the way I do things.

I've this weird sense of...I'm not sure, guilt? I feel like I've let everyone down. Everyone. My family, my boyfriend, my best friend, my ex co-workers, my friends. I'm not really too concerned over anything I do when it affects me. But the problem is I don't allow myself any room to breathe and see that none of these people think I've let them down, nor are they asking ME to fix all of it, or even none of it. Some of them have said so to me, and it isn't nearly enough to dissuade me from cowering in a corner in futile attempt in willing everything okay.

Yesterday, my folks are talking about going to Morelia for a few weeks and my niece, of all people, tells me her family's off to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks (her mom's brothers live there), and the first thought to cross my brain isn't at all productive. After talking with Ricardo for a couple hours I'm left thinking, why shouldn't they? All practical questions aside (frankly, I'm concerned where all this money for all of this is coming/going to come from), of course just because things aren't going well for me and mine doesn't mean they (and me) need to let their lives come to a stop. Easy answer. Why can't I do that?

I feel like everyone in my life is depending on me to make everything better. They're not, but it's the only way I can describe how it feels. And if I don't do it, if more time passes and more things continue to pile up (my fucking car didn't start this afternoon!), it's going to be more difficult to fix...life (?).

Ricardo asked me earlier, if I was back in January, around the time I'd said to him I was offered the opportunity to transfer to Santa Barbara, what would I've done then. Then, early January, I was all set, I really was. At the time, I couldn't imagine a single thing to stop me, you know. Hindsight's such trash. But is that what I want to go back to, would that make everything better? The real answer is who the fuck cares.

I found out today one of my friends' grandparents recently passed away. And I was too self-involved in either my own little pettiness or my drama to not even know and be present.

Men In Porn

2010-05-28T00:17:00.000-07:00

Men in porn - straight, gay, whatever - have the worst possible tattoos.

I Love You, Bret Easton Ellis

2010-05-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Xeni Jardin tweeted this link. In it, Bret Easton Ellis's feelings on why women aren't necessarily as good film directors as men are sort of criticized. Sort of because, well, where's the support in the criticism? Says the post's writer:

"Where to start? The part where he sounds semi-apologetic about his misogyny and then reclaims it all over again to claim that The Proposal is worse than say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? How about the part where Ellis thinks a director is always responsible for the visual components of a movie, except for when that director is a woman like Sofia Coppola? Or that women don't have a visual sensibility because he thinks only men get one? Or when he says that all female directors are "emotionalist"?

It is tempting to go through one by one, and point out the absurdity of these claims. Then again, in addition to his printed and onscreen oeuvre, this is a man whose previous Tweets have included, "John Mayer in the March Playboy is one of the most interesting, funny and revelatory celebrity interviews I've ever read. He just gets it." In other words, his idea of revelatory is saying things that are deep-seated, prejudicial convention and protesting that everyone can't handle his edgy truth. So he really doesn't care if it's actually true or not."

I for one would've loved to hear the support against Ellis's absurd claims. Really. I'm not overreaching, I think, because a good argument is based on, well, arguing, but I think this little post doesn't do what I thought it might do, which is tear apart Ellis's comments with supporting claims of the writer's position. But there were none. It read to me the same way it sounds like when folk claim they're Mexican but don't know why.

And what about Bret Easton Ellis's comments regarding women as film directors? He says:

"Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn’t a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don’t know."

And, just prior to this, Ellis states:

"There’s something about the medium of film itself that I think requires the male gaze...We’re watching, and we’re aroused by looking, whereas I don’t think women respond that way to films, just because of how they’re built."

Is there any truth to what Ellis says? The knee-jerk reaction is he is wrong, as highlighted in the livejournal post. But as person who enjoys movies and film, I'm finding it very very difficult to disagree. I'd ask everyone, which are your favorite woman-directed movies and I'd wager a lot of us would need a moment or two of thinking to come up with a few. We can each come up with our favorite movies list in seconds, and I'd ask how many of these were made by women directors and I'd guess none.

It's very difficult to come up with a film that I love that features a woman at the helm. AMERICAN PSYCHO is one (of course, being that the source material is also a top three favorite of mine didn't hurt), and my favorite movie of all last year was THE HURT LOCKER. It isn't that I love these films because they were made by women, but because they're fantastic stories told with such fearlessness and with individual aesthetics that it would be hard to point out each films' flaws. But, personally, aside from these, what else do I get? My boyfriend and I were briefly talking last night about this. I read to him the bit where Ellis says that TRANSFORMERS is a better movie than THE PROPOSAL and Corey's reaction was that the TRANSFORMERS is trash and he really liked THE PROPOSAL. I asked whether or not us liking the movies made them any good (I also said that if given the option between the two, despite the terrible amounts of shit TRANSFORMERS is, that's the one I'd chose to watch), which of course lead us to the bigger question of what 'good' is, which to me sounds like what Ellis is saying: is a movie a good movie because a woman made it? If what I get from women directors are romantic comedies that don't really serve any artistic purpose, how can I not think women make bad movies? It's all in the evidence presented by the creators.

But, here's an example. Take THE PUNISHER: here you have a comics character in two movies made within a decade of each other, neither of which is spectacular film making. The first iteration was made by Jonathan Hensleigh and it's absolute trash. It isn't even fun. Everything about this movie makes me retch because it took what has been a good idea for action movies (revenge!) and made it a caricature that no one finds redeeming (he has a story credit as well). Four years later, Lexi Alexander made the second movie, and it's endlessly a much better-made movie that's not only more fun and violent and funny and exciting. Does it mean that the latter movie is better because a woman made it?

Like Ellis, I love the work Sofia Coppola puts out, even MARIE ANTOINETTE. I think her way of making movies each time has a clear vision and therefore genuinely brilliant artistic value. Kathryn Bigelow's STRANGE DAYS is also an incredibly brilliant film (but now a much dated story than I imagined back in the early 1990's). And I've loved all of Floria Sigismondi's music videos (I've zero interest in a movie about The Runaways, incidentally). So, the women who've access to making movies, how come they make such claptrap trash? What happens? It just seems that even just asking the question, or as Ellis did and sharing the opinion, labels you as sexist and misogynist. Okay. Fine. Just show me where the movies are and I too will re-think my opinion.

“…I’m just tired of being wrong all the time just because I’m a guy…I mean, a male chauvinist isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women…Women are right. You’re wrong. You get used to the idea. You live down to expectations.” - Chuck Palahniuk, CHOKE

Choice

2010-05-23T14:39:00.000-07:00

Here I am.

There's a bit to be said for going into things half-cocked, you know. Probably, most of what can be said isn't very good because jumping in the water without knowing how deep it is could lead to brain smashing results. Anyway.

It's been difficult. It is difficult. All these things that are happening right now and the things that are not happening. Said to my brothers the other day how it is the first time in our lives that we're finding ourselves more alike than ever...in dramatically despairing ways. We kind of laughed about it for a moment. Before, last week or the week before, the entire family is having lunch and we're talking about my niece's schooling and we're talking about the paradoxism of parents telling kids to not do what they did even though they came out better people for it. We're talking travel and we're talking going back to school (my sister-in-law is currently in a Master's Program) and having kids (new nephew, exactly twenty-three days old today). We're this little group of people who, when the water's not been deep enough, has been there for each other. For me. And I look around at these people I love and wonder who can we, collectively, turn to now? There is no one you see. And I'm talking about pragmatism, because that's an out right now that none of us seem to have.

Neither of my brothers and I have been able to find work. For whichever reasons there may be, it's come to the point where, personally, I'm having a lot of difficulty thinking about anything but and feeling, not lost, but a huge sense of weight, you know. My father has three more weeks worth of work. There are two kids in my immediate family, my mother and I are in treatment for our respective illnesses. This is what I think about a lot. It's what's making me worry a lot. Literally, it's what's keeping me up at night.

Corey and I were talking before and we said how despite my own take on it, I do very much feel like part of what makes me me is that I feel the responsibility of being able to provide not for myself but for him, for my family. For everyone. And it's affects me when I can't. It really does. Noble or not, just or not, courageous or not, it's fucking driving me insane.

And it's making me very sad.

I don't want to rant on and on about these weirdly socio-econimic structures we're in, the plight of the poor, the battles of the middle class, our constant consumerist culture, the irrelevance of bits of the private/public sector.

When I left Las Vegas five years ago this coming weekend, things were dismal and low and shattered in very many places. And the cliche of history repeating isn't far from my mind, and just like then, doing something about takes so much damned time. It does. It's not the lack of doing or the lack of focus or the lack of attention. That's what gets me a little powered for something. It's the waiting, this interim, this space that makes it all seem overwhelming and very stressful and very, very terrible. And, honest, this interim, as terrible as it feels sometimes, I don't know that it's not entirely deserved, you know.

I've never been one to cast off blame to anyone or anything when something bad occurs to me because these things happen because of what I do or don't do, and blaming anyone and anything else other than myself is total bullshit. But my problem is I'm harder on myself than anyone else. I guess that applies to most of us, doesn't it?

So, I've spent the last few hours imagining how I'm going to tackle this upcoming week and after a quick talk with Corey the other night, and joking a bit with my two brothers earlier, perhaps it doesn't need to be so difficult. What's upcoming? Choice.

Blue Sky

2010-05-18T22:56:00.000-07:00

Last night, while on the phone with Golden, I needed to take one my meds, and did. And tried very hard to articulate to my best friend how I'd just had a little dispiriting moment. She said I better continue taking my meds and I tried to tell her that it wasn't that I wouldn't continue taking them, but that the fact that I had just then done it made me think, 'Shit, here we are, for life,' and she said I better. So, I tried again that it wasn't as if the medication was an option but that I was yet again reminded that I had to take them because it'll keep me a little safer for alittle while longer (Corey and I joke that they keep us alive (which is true but then I guess for someone who's not HIV/AIDS positive, they might think that's a fucked thing for anyone to say, but, hey it makes us laugh)), and my best friend just castigated me a bit that I better not consider stopping.

Sigh, right?

I've often wondered what goes on through my family's individual minds about me whenever this topic comes up, intentionally or not. I was on the phone with Golden, so I just verybalized what I thought, and I wonder if she did the same. Who really knows. Sometimes I just want to ask them straight out if they think I feel different physically, do they think I feel as if I'm ebbing away, are they constantly thinking that I'm dying, what do they see when they see me? Two years ago I began shaving my head, and my mother had a fucking fit over that because she and my father both said it reminded them I was sick. Now, so far removed, I call bullshit on that. At the time I didn't, but I did ask if they honestly thought that's what I looked like, a sick person. Neither really said so.

Yes, every so often I have pangs of, 'Man, I am seriously fucked and sick and shit,' and I feel bad about it for a moment but it passes more quickly than you'd think. Maybe feel bad is the wrong phrase. But for a brief moment, I'm taken back to three years ago and I'm thinking that I've this weird dark cloud over me that no one I love except for Corey really understand. The people in my life, how do you tell them that randomly, briefly, for just a moment, I realize I've a disease that could be killing me rightnowthisverysecond?

Sure, even a dark rain cloud passes over time, but mostly after it's left its mark on the rain-soaked ground.

Assembly

2010-05-16T19:12:00.000-07:00

Early last week I turned on the television and browsed through the channel guide and saw that BBC America had a STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION marathon on. And that's what I did last Tuesday.

And I'm watching it and it's still entertaining after nearly twenty years of not having watched it (although I have watched the movie iterations of this series several times). I still find that Data is my favorite and I've a newly-found crush on Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden. It's pure cheap sci-fi escapism of course. But it's terrible. As a piece of work, it's bad. It's nothing to do with production values and maybe even the acting. But its structure as a television program makes it bad. The melodramatic beats are basically semaphored way in advance, the tension is only called tension because you want it to be over not because you want to see what happens next, the comedic bits are only there awkwardly to try and shoehorn in some semblance of humanity into this odd construct of television, the lack of suspense is pretty much guaranteed because STARK TREK - any of its derivations - is the basic good guys versus bad. I still enjoyed these few hours of television nostalgia, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it again at some point (if I could manage to get my hands on some DEEP SPACE NINE episodes that'd be sweet!). But it doesn't mean it's not bad television.

Yesterday, Corey told me about the latest episode of GLEE, a television program he enjoys very much, and is apparently very popular and I don't understand why. But then, it's not GLEE that I've a problem per se: I've never seen an episode and I don't think I will ever choose to [so I might watch it in the future]. No, my problem, I think is with the fact that GLEE, much like STAR TREK is bad because television is just a bad medium, and unfortunately, most people take television to be something so important and relevant and as art. This is my problem with television.

I used to plan my classes around FRIENDS and WILL & GRACE and ALLY MCBEAL. I remember it was because in the first case, of course I wanted to know what happened; in the second case, it was the first time I saw an openly gay (albeit, oddly unfamiliar) male on television; and in the third case, I thought the writing was so clever and Ally was so adorable, I just had to watch. But between then and now, nearly fifteen years later, something happened that made me stop. And I'm not certain what. Corey and I were talking yesterday and I said the same thing. I don't remember really having an aversion to television until I was well into my twenties, and I still watch television shows from time to time (more on that bit later), but it doesn't have any weight to it for me as means of information, as means of disseminating the culture, and definitely not as art. Why am I the odd man out here? I don't think I am.

So, I'm watching STAR TREK and I'm loving and hating it. Hating it because its basic structure for a one-hour drama is of course very evident. You know all the cues, for example, but I don't think you're aware of them. In a show like STAR TREK for example, you've four commercial breaks which means there must be four pseudo-cliffhangers that make you stay in tune so that itself defeats many of the emotional and dramatic suspense you might have, and because this is STAR TREK, regardless of what's happened in the story, you know the status quo will be the same and comfortably back to the beginning, you and the characters and the story are basically back to being where you were unchanged and unaffected. I know what you're thinking: this is fucking STAR TREK for crying out loud! Right. What about the television shows you watch, is this their basic structure? Of course it is.

Television is just bad entertainment not because of the stories it tells (cliches or not, a lot of television storylines are excellent, but are wasted in the medium) but because of how it chooses to tell them.

I looked up the most popular television program currently on network television, LOST, and watched its first half-season ever. The basic story is okay and a little intimidating from one point of view, but possibly too derivative to be taken fully seriously (remember, only seven episodes watched, alright?). However, the pilot episode works pretty well story wise, the acting's decent (actors trying to find their show-voices), and the direction is not bad nor good but, well, bland. But this isn't about story, it's about structure. And LOST, regardless of how good its story or acting or production is (frankly, after the third episode I decided LOST wasn't for me; if it was a book, I would've closed it and returned it to the store by page fifty-something), is pretty much what you'd expect a television program to do. Its use of music to give the audience emotional cues and attempting at ratcheting up drama via horrible camera work, and the little segments of story that just have to have enough information to keep you locked in for a commercial break because it MUST GO TO COMMERCIAL BREAKS, all of that make this program, regarless of story, unwatchable.

(I went with LOST due, really, just to all the fucking hoopla regarding its upcoming end.)

((If I were talking story-wise, LOST is useless, but that's a different and less informed (seven episodes!) opinion.))

Of course, this is the reason why networks like HBO and STARZ make original content because of this lack of 'rules'. Network television is a pop song while paid-programming is a concept record.

I don't recall when I couldn't get past this way of watching television. That decision is somewhere in my memory but I can't remember it. But network television still has two stand outs for me. Still not talking story, SEINFELD and THE SIMPSONS avoided these conventions not necessarily by mere story alone. I'd imagine these two shows' producers chose NOT to do what everyone else is doing (one argument for THE SIMPSONS has been the fact that it's an animated program to begin with) because when I watch them now, yes, they're still entertaining, but I also don't feel the need to disassemble them into their corresponding parts the way that I have LOST and STAR TREK. I get that it's a business model as well as a television program model, but that's where it loses me.

I think television stories can be better told in either film or comic book form in a much more effective and artistic way, but that's another post for another time (yesterday, Corey and I briefly discussed Y: THE LAST MAN, whose writer, Brian K. Vaughan, eventually became a writer on LOST, incidentally.).

I will probably watch GLEE at some point in the future. My boyfriend is a fan and I think his influence might have something to do with it. But when I do watch it, or any other television program, hopefully I can enjoy a story the same way I can enjoy a pop song without the need to recognize its parts and take it as whole instead. And if I can't, that's okay too. I've been okay without regular television for years. I'm sure I'd be okay without it for a few more years as well.

Space

2010-05-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

Last night at Corey's writing workshop's reading, I chose a seat away from everyone else who was there. Because I don't like to be around a group of people I don't know. I'm weird that way. I think I get on pretty well with strangers, but I'd much rather not. I've no problems saying hello, and making small talk, and asking questions, and talking about things. But I'd much rather not. I hate the familiarity people automatically assign themselves even if we've not met.

I met Brittany, what, seven years ago? We've talked maybe four times in all those years and I still think it's weird she hugs me when I see her. I mean, I suppose it's a nice thing to do but I don't know her, not really. And I think that's weird. A month ago, Corey and I began going to church and few weeks ago I met Alejandro (I think), one of the pastors, and we chatted a bit. The next week, pleasant and all, but he came over to say hello before service and hugged and kissed me on the cheek. I don't know him either and I think it's weird (Corey asked me a bit later what I thought about that because he knows I hate it when strangers touch me (which in itself is probably weird to everyone else), and while I can't recall what I said a few weeks back, I think it was the same.).

Last night at the church where the reading was held, I was thinking about six years back, when I first met Jobea and David and Justin at the Chuck Palahniuk reading. I don't remember how the three of us started talking. I was there on my own, so was Justin, and Jobea and David met on the plane as they moved to Las Vegas (I might be remembering this wrong), and clearly we were there for the same reason and we already had something in common, so probably it was that why we started talking. Funny thing is, as I'm sitting in the church last night, I'm thinking at every other of the type of event that I like like last night's reading, I've never made the effort to talk to anyone. How does that happen I wonder.

I like my space.

Make It Chemical

2010-05-04T02:04:00.000-07:00

Went to pick up my meds and the lady at the pharmacy tells me my insurance has expired. Sure, I can pick up my pills but at full price. What is the full price you ask? Roughly $1200 each. Without insurance, for me to be able to continue living, I'd have to pay these people about $2400 every month. Puts the whole renting vs. buying a house in a weird sort of perspective.

The two pills I take are Truvada and Intelence.

Problem becomes that I haven't been able to get in contact with anyone from my old job's benefits department. This whole COBRA mess was too damn good to be true. I'm sure tomorrow I'll be able to get all this straightened out. Perhaps I should be worried but I'm not. But all of this has brought back to me the idea of a National Health Service. This is the sort of situation where this would be a non-issue if all Americans had equal access to healthcare. Never mind me, imagine if it was you and you needed some sort of treatment just to live but couldn't afford it, what would you do? What could you do?

(I'd called the Long Beach CARE Program recently about other options in regards to options for HIV positive folk in my stead and the very helpful woman on the phone said the best possible option was for me to try to keep my insurance because otherwise, even The Ryan White Act provided little in terms of assistance, and I would then be left up to whatever public assistance can do, which, she said, isn't very much considering my particular situation (which was something that I'd discussed with my older brother and Corey a bit ago, that I'm not sick enough to qualify for government programs and I'm too well off to even apply for them), and that in itself was disappointing to hear, not because of me (well, partly) but because other folk who don't have the resources that I do would simply linger.)

As I'm talking about this cost that I really didn't know until now, I'm reminded of what Clayton Cubitt said last year:

"I can't conceive of inventing a pill that would save lives, then charging money for it. I'm a failed capitalist."

Problem with every industry is that there's always someone who's out to make money. No one wants to just do the right thing, do they?

Anyway, imagine up to what point I'd have to reach before anyone anywhere who isn't family would help me. Suppose it was someone you care about, what then? That's the thing about examples and fictions and for instances, it's all make believe and not real, is it? Tell you something: I'm pretty real.

Party For The Fight To Write

2010-05-01T00:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not very good, but I am.

Corey's been going to a writing workshop for last few Mondays. He's told me after each session how inspired he feels, and how he's amazed by how some folk there use words so well. He himself is pretty good writer (it is, after all, what got me interested in reading him way back when (it was back in 2006! aaah!!)), and so hearing such things from someone who I think is good (I'm being objective, honest!) certainly makes me curious. And jealous!

So, look, Corey tells me about his projects for his workshop and immediately I think about what I would do. I'm very cannibalizing this way. And he's excited about it, and wants to talk about it, all of which, in turn, make me excited and want to talk about it...even though it doesn't pertain at all to me. Years ago, when I lived in Las Vegas, I almost managed to get a writing workshop together. Almost. But what that would've been is a bunch of younger kids who're more creative than me, bounding about Mormonism and indie punk. But since I've been in Long Beach, I've not felt that fire. A few weeks ago, Corey said I could've taken the workshop with him and at the time he told me about it, I didn't even once think to ask him if I should or even could.

I took creative writing twice in college even though I didn't need to take it either time. I studied Language and Linguistics and that's pretty much math with words instead of numbers. But one of the things I took away from both sessions was the feeling of competition. So when Corey tells me about his workshop, I get jealous. Honest. Because I want to do that, compete, because I know I'm good at this. Right?

Last week, Corey got an email from his workshop teacher about a writer's retreat in Los Angeles. Immediately, I wanted to know more about it, but before I could even finish my thought, Corey asked me whether or not I wanted in. He forwarded me the information and on Friday we both sent off our applications and writing samples (last night, we're talking about what could happen if we both are accepted or only one. That's a different sort of post). And I'm very excited by this.

One thing that got me very jazzed is how well I work under pressure. To be honest, I am not a planner, I am not an organizational person at all. So, as we lay on his bed, talking writing (his) and looking over the application, I realized we both only had a couple of days during which we needed to get our work in order. I worked through the night editing this story and getting it to acceptable levels for my entry. And as I'm working on it, I came to the conclusion that my writing is pretty good. That I'm good at it. And I like the story, the way that it's fractured just right, the way it omits things that aren't at all necessary, the way its themes cover a lot of bases, and, plainly, the way the language in it moves.

The other thing that I found very exciting about this process was the fact that I'm in direct competition with other folk for a spot and hopefully a scholarship to the retreat (Corey and I covered briefly that we are, basically, competing for the same spot in the program). I know I'm not the best amateur writer out there, but I've this nagging suspicion that I'm pretty much top 10%. Really. Arrogance notwithstanding, it's that sort of spirit of outdoing the rest. One of things I love about working: I'm pretty much always one of if not the best.

Anyway, Corey says we'll find out whether or not we're in mid-June. That's six weeks away.

Consumer

2010-04-23T23:34:00.000-07:00

Two-three years ago, Golden was in town visiting Kortney and the three of us went to the Shore House diner in Long Beach. I remembered it since then (it's located in the Belmont Shore neighborhood which has become such a string of douchebaggery over the last few years, I tend to avoid it). And I think what I remember most about that place during that first visit is the waiter guy. I think he was Hispanic because he had a thick Spanish accent but he had green/gray eyes, maybe middle-aged, and I remember him because he was incredibly nice to the three of us. I mean, neither Golden nor Kortney nor I are high maintenance customers but at the same time, I felt like my patronage was appreciated.

Years ago, before our trip to Philadephia and Seattle, Golden and I went to the mall for things to wear. And I remember very clearly we went into the Gap store despite my own reservations so Golden could get something. At the register, the girl took what Golden was buying and started ringing her up. The cashier did not once say hello and she did not make eye contact until, Golden, seeing what was happening, courteously but audibly said hello to the cashier.

Recently, Corey and I have been going places that unfortunately remind me more and more of the latter example than the former. And then it made me think yesterday, as Corey and I left Basix in West Hollywood, as I'm typing a quick complaint email, as to whether or not I'm a demanding customer.

I think at restaurants, when I order and I don't like what comes - either because I don't like it, or because I order something familiar sounding but is not what I want - I'm willing to chalk that up to adventurous ordering. When I go places I've never been with people who have, of course I ask what's good. And everything is up for grabs except seafood and curries. Most recent example was at the aforementioned Basix. Corey and I went for breakfast after church service and I ordered huevos rancheros and the plate was disappointing in size and flavor. Not sure how that's possible on supposed eggs sunny side up. But that's fine: I knew I would probably not like it and I stuck with it.

What puts me off more than bad food choices (and even bad food) is the service. Yesterday, we took a bit to place our order. We always do and the servers always keep coming back and I wonder how frustrating that may be for them. The service sector is about turnover right? So, we finally placed our order and the guy who was our waiter suddenly stopped coming. He didn't even bring our food out; someone else did that so where was our waiter? He didn't come back until Corey stopped him to ask for water and syrup. And then he returned when it was time to pay. I asked Corey whether or not he was going to leave a tip for the waiter because I was not.

Of course, it always reminds me of Mr. Pink in Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS. And then Mr. Blue asking Mr. Pink if a waitress taking him out back and giving him a blow job would be enough to garner a tip. Anyway...

I've been to two places Corey's suggested and the service has been, in my honest opinion, abysmal. As I mentioned before, it wasn't the food that put me off, or even the highly pretentious atmosphere at the other place, Rocksugar in Century City, but rather the terrible waiters we've had. Corey's mentioned he's okay with that because the ambiance and food are what he's there for. That's what people do, I think. So why do I even bother going out to eat anywhere? To be fair, Corey and I went to the Pho Cafe in Silver Lake and while the food wasn't what I was expecting, the guy who served us was pretty awesome so I would definitely go back there and try something else.

It leads me to ask this question about me: am I too demanding a customer?

I've often said I wouldn't ever work in the food service industry precisely because of people like ME. Why is that? Do I expect too much? What do I really want? If it isn't the food nor ambiance, then what is it I go places for? To berate the waitstaff once it's out of earshot? Hm,

Which also reminds me of Mr. Pink when he goes on to describe how many times his cup of coffee must be refilled in ratio to the time he's spent at the table.

My odd expectations at restaurants seems to be all consuming for me as soon as I walk in: am i greeted, did the hostess cop an attitude, did we have silverware at the table, did someone come for my drink order, did I get what I wanted fast, is the waiter friendly, is he knowledgeable, how many times will I have to ask for something, how many times am I asked if I'd like anything else, is the waiter visibly impatient, did I get everything I ordered when I ordered it, am I thanked, am I offered dessert even though I don't like them? And I'm sure there are more in this already-long list. And I think as soon as at least two of these are not meant, the only conceivable reason for it is our waiter, and by extension, the restaurant are not worth my time and money.

Who the hell am I? A customer. But, as the boyfriend's said before about other circumstances, am I human?

Corey's said at this rate we're not going to have very many places we can go to. He's right and I am wrong. Because, well, why should I hold a weirdly arbitrary standard to people who're doing a job even I wouldn't do?

There will be more about this, to be sure...

Re-Gifters

2010-04-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

We were talking gifts the other day.

I don't keep very many things people give me over the years, whether friends or ex's. Because there is a disassociation with the people who gave them to me. Corey and I were talking, and this is what I said. I don't return anything that was given to me that I don't like because I appreciate the gesture and thought. But once that particular relationship is dissolved, whether through my or the other person's actions/inactions, there is no point in cluttering my life with things.

Don't get me wrong: I keep things that truly matter in context.

But most things do not last that long. People don't last that long.

I'm really not much one for gifts. I mean, I like giving to someone something I think they will like, or I know they want, or both. But as far as I'm concerned, the gesture, not the thing itself, matters a little more.

I was thinking that there wasn't anything from the last, say, ten years that I've kept beyond the 'I like it' part of it. But there are. A few. One being the envelope Golden gave me back in 2003 with the zine she made. Another is from 2004 when Justin mailed me a framed and autographed version of this photo. Another is this bracelet Cynthia gave me. And most recently, it's this list of things Corey gave me for Valentine's Day. I have these things and will continue having them because they matter in the context of my life at these various points in time. And, truly, most everything else I've gotten does not stand up very well to this test.

(Don't misunderstand: I've other things from before, during, and after the ones above. But the sentimental cache if you will isn't there anymore and I keep a CD because I like the music in it, for example.)

Corey called it 'love stories in the trash' in a text. But it's not nearly that, I don't think. Sometimes, I come across something someone's given me and that person and I no longer have any sort of emotional or personal or even practical attachment, so why keep it? Years ago, this girl, Carly, gave me a framed picture of her and me at her birthday party and I got rid of it a few years ago because...there is not reason for me to have it any more. It reminds of all the things kids write in year books during the last week of classes and we write "K-I-T" but no one does it; it's the polite thing to do because we know full-well that we are not going to do it. I know I'm not. I don't have anything anyone's given me who is no longer a meaningful part of my life. With very few exceptions. Funny thing: my best friend tweeted this quote from SEX & THE CITY as I began typing this.

All of this reminds me, of course, of CHOKE by Chuck Palahniuk: "You'd be surprised how easy it is to close the door to your past."

I'm not sure if this means that I'm more utilitarian than I think I am, or just more petty. Probably a little of both (or a lot of both.).

But then it makes me think of whether or not I place a higher value on the thing than the person. I mean, I have a handful of things that mean something to me - a good memory, a sad one - but the person from whom it came, why don't I have the same emotional attachment to it? Obvious answer is, well, I held that person in high regard but they showed me I was wrong and they are worth less than what they say. How vile does that last sentence sound?

While I'm not partial to receiving (I'm going to snicker at the double entendre!) anything, I suppose thinking that the person who got me something to for any effect probably has in their mind that I will always have it. I mean, I do when I give. For the most part I think we all do. I really do. But once that relationship is dissolved, then what? Clutter. It's the literal representation of when we say about each other that we have a lot of baggage with us at all times. Perhaps when I get rid of that book you gave me because it comes with baggage: you.

Tonight, Next Year

2010-04-02T03:50:00.000-07:00

We went to lunch and a short walk and a movie and a fast-food dinner.

We talk for hours about meaningful things. And there've been some frustrations on both sides of the conversation over the last year.

One of the things we talked about today (yesterday?) was time and how I feel my perception of time is skewed. Before, I've said that there is no such thing as time, and I'm awake all it is is change and entropy (grand and original though, hey?). But as we're talking briefly about the preceeding year, and I think again how everything that happened last year had to have happened in my life, it still feels as if everything was just yesterday (more accurately, all of it happened last week), and he says he feels he's a bit more removed than I am from all of that. Last year wasn't absolutely terrible, but it wasn't good, was it?

And when we're laying next to each other - sweat and come spent - I feel like I'm trying to see if tonight will seem like yesterday next year. Or if he'll see tonight as having happened years ago next year.

We both agreed that everything that's happened since January seems to be compressed into a much shorter amount of time than three months. A lot has indeed happened in three months for him and me and us, definitely not everything has been unambiguous and not everything has been sad.

Just got off the phone with my best friend and we're talking, not about time, no, but we're talking about making reckless choices, or having the choices be made for us. Which is the better option? As I tend to do, I vote for the former.

So, we strip off each other's clothes and move and maneuver and kiss and grind and lick and envelop each other and you know what? fuck next year.

Current

2010-03-23T17:56:00.001-07:00

Currently:

My favorite picture of Corey.

My favorite picture of me.

My favorite picture of us.

"Margaret Wente Is An Idiot" or "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret Wente. And I'm Kind of a Dumbass."

2010-03-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

Theremina pointed us to this article yesterday, WHY ARE BLOGGERS MALE? by one, Margaret Wente. Some bits:

On why she doesn't blog (apparently guys love snowmobiling, incidentally): "It's more of a guy thing."

"That's also why guys like blogging – instant opinions, and lots of them. Men clearly have an urge to blog that women lack."

And the winner for me: "Women never held peeing contests. Perhaps that helps explain why women tend to be more restrained and less concerned with public displays of prowess. We are just as interested in listening as in talking, and more interested in relationships than scoring points. We also tend to lack the public confidence that comes so easily to many men."

(Ms Yayanos writes over at Coilhouse.)

It's an interesting bit of writing in that Ms Wente is clearly an insane person. I'm of the mind that someone like her would have done her research as Ms Yayanos points out in her own piece, but I'm pretty astounded that this was deemed fit-to-print because of the sheer lunacy of it. It presupposes, to me, that women don't have any sort of interest in this particular bit of the 21st Century. Women don't have the inclination toward it, have no desire in partaking, and would just be bad at it. Is any of that true? Of course it isn't. It doesn't take but a moment through dig through any of our bookmark folders to see it's nowhere near truth. But nevermind, that: ask your circle of friends. But I'm getting off topic.

The assumption that blogging is some sort of men's competition (which I'm not naive to believe isn't partly true) and is best left for them is absolutely ridiculous. It's like saying that writing period -- say, journalism, for one -- is merely a man's thing because it is only men who have the predisposition for it. Is THIS true? Certainly not.

Personally, I just find it curious how Ms Wente just painted a weird caricature of women the same way Tyler Perry does of black people with his movies and she believes it (I'm also of the mind that when you say something, you only say it because you believe it). It's one of the things I dislike most about a person, this sort of self-hate in a way. Marginalizing your gender group, in this case, from the inside and being certain and resolute about it.

(It also makes me think of American-born Mexican folk I've come to meet in this country who target those who're only recently arrived through any means: ready to tear them down because immigrants are not at all like them. But, I'm digressing.)

The idea posited by her writing is a very bleak one if you are a woman who blogs. Hell, if you're a woman who writes. And of course, I find it hypocritical that this is how this woman earns a living.

I wonder what makes people of any type to seemingly be set again others from their group (coincidentally, last night, Corey and I were talking similarly about those of us who aren't straight and what there is to be proud of there; my take wasn't as positive (this too is a different post).). I really want to understand because if logic falls in place and reveals some truth, then I'd be more inclined to believe the argument...

...or it could be just like Ms Yayanos says: "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret Wente. And I'm Kind of a Dumbass."

Read: Generation A

2010-03-12T22:27:00.000-08:00

It begins with a tsunami and ends on an island.

When bees have been extinct for years and five people from all over the world are stung, forces mobilize and trips into pharmaceuticals and celebrity and religion and World of Warcraft and Abercrombie & Fitch and tourette's syndrome and maybe even a little brain stem cloning happen.

These five people--Harj, Zack, Samantha, Diane, Julien--must surely have something in common that long-extinct bees suddenly have stung them. But they don't. Not really. Not at first. But what happens is as they begin to unravel the reason (not mystery) of what's happening to them, I find myself seeing the world through their eyes. Not because they're their eyes. Their eyes are mine. (In a previous novel (ALL FAMILIES ARE PSYCHOTIC), Coupland introduced an HIV-infected mother and her dysfunctional family. And it seems so prescient that when I was dealing with my initial HIV diagnosis, I read this novel, and I was and am Janet Drummond.) One of the strangest things and most powerful things that Douglas Coupland manages to do with his stories for me is place them in the NOW. His stories and his characters could never have existed at any other point in time. And as I read about Harj while in the middle of the 2004 tsunami, or Samantha attempting to make an "earth sandwich," I know when all of this is taking place. But the ridiculousness of this feeling of NOW for me is that I am Harj and I am Samantha, and I couldn't be anyone else. Like them, I am built for this time on earth and I couldn't have even been conceived of in any other point in history.

Coupland takes a certain amount of story time telling stories. His characters tell each other stories and reveals something that even they didn't know: that once you access your creative imagination and sit around a fire and tell each other stories, we're creating a better world for us all. But as it's asked, why is it so difficult for people to tell stories? Answer:

"Stories come from a part of you that only gets visited rarely - sometimes never at all. I think most people spend so much time trying to convince themselves that their lives are stories that the actual story-creating part of their brains hardens and dies. People forget that there are other ways to ordering the world."

And it makes me believe that Coupland feels the need to tell stories even in the age of digital everything and satellites and sms messaging is even more important than all of this tech. Maybe I'm naive in believing so, but Coupland makes me feel I am right and belong in this world. Stories. Not anecdotes, not jokes, but actual stories. Stories about us--ourselves! Humans as stories! Humans telling stories! And while not necessarily talking about telling stories as entertainment nor as a means to passing down history: when Coupland places the five in a circle, telling stories, this is what will eventually lead to their conclusion: they can save the world.

But ultimately, what GENERATION A does for me is that it makes me believe that we are not doomed in this hyperconnected world. Really, it's not that I believe this will lead us down the path of ruin, me, using this light and machinery to write this, but just because the world is changing, even if by our designs and desire and greed, the world remains a remarkable place that finds its way to let you know hoe much it's worth to stop and admire everything that you've forgotten you have. That I've forgotten I have. And I will always tell you a story.

Written by Douglas Coupland.

Unsent Email Number ?

2010-03-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

hey.

i'm not sure what happened but good luck and i'm sorry.

i'm sorry for being an impossible person to get through to. i built up very many walls very fast when i feel i'm wronged, real or not. but you know this. i told you this the last time we talked.

and whether or not i'm right or wrong, this isn't about that. it's about me not seeing the good in a person. not anymore. because i do see it and am drawn to it, and when it's focused on me, even for a fraction of the time, i want to keep it always. but when it's taken away from me, through no fault of my own, well, then it becomes toxic to me. whether that's wrong, i don't much care, you see, because i simply can't care anymore. you hurt my feelings and for that you must pay. this is how i work. whether it's right, that's debatable.

so, here i sit, thinking that what's good about you is what i'm depriving myself of, and by depriving you of me, i get my revenge. and i'm sorry for that.

and good luck. because i want good things for you.

Double Up

2010-02-24T20:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to the doctor for my winter appointment. While there, I got a chance to talk to him and to his wife, Susan, about how long it's been since I started seeing them. I made a comment how it really hasn't seemed like nearly three years. Susan asked me if I remembered how timid and scared I was the very first time I walked through their office doors and I smiled and said I did remember. Because I do. Of course I do. I'll probably remember it forever.

I first found out I am HIV positive on Friday, September 28, 2007. I'm not going to go into all that diatribe again. If you're so inclined, this is where all that can be found. Anyway: back then, I was a mess. Corey and I were talking recently about it, briefly, and he said how much of a turnaround I seem to have had since the original diagnosis and now. He's right.

Look, I can only say that the first year after finding out I was positive was very difficult for me. And, as I look back, I see someone who isn't who I am now. Which is the only possible outcome as far as I'm concerned. As Corey and I were talking then, I remember saying how very much I would kick myself in the ass if I could; if I could go back in time and talk to 2007 me, I would totally have to tell him to stop with the histrionics and foolishness. But that's for an imaginary life. Now, as things turned out, my numbers are the highest/lowest they've been since I first started seeing my doctor. Way back when, my T-Cell count was 333, and my viral load was over 49000. Yesterday, T-Cells were at 712 and viral load was less than 75. All of which is infinitely good for me. My doctor says the same thing every single time I see him: he says he doesn't see why I keep going to visit him, he says I'm always damn healthy, my blood tests always show that everything is working properly and nothing else indicates anything else. Since I started seeing him, I decided to keep track of my doctor's visits (which has morphed a little into my adventures with general and specialized medicine).

There are some days when I'm fully aware of the virus. And sometimes it gets me down a bit, I'll admit. Usually, it happens when I've forgotten to take my meds or when I need to refill them. It's happened recently, early this winter, as the entire family seemed to be struck with a vicious cold one at a time, and my niece was kept at home so as to not be around me. My older brother's said that there have been times when if Emma, my niece, is sick, he'd rather not expose me to all the little terrors she picks up from the monsters at her school. My father's said I should get the swine flu shot because I am already sick. You know, things like these. Which, as I've said before, makes me feel a little down because everything seems to be a little emergency now.

Still, it seems more like a nuisance than anything else. You know, like getting up and going to work in the damn early predawn hours: you do it because you must, there's no point in crying about it.

I don't know, after leaving the doctor's yesterday, of course everything was made of chocolate and whipped cream! And I think a lot about what could have been, probably more than it's healthy to. But at the same time, I think about myself and how, to Corey's point, there's been such a change, which has been totally unconscious. Used to be I was very good in the middle of a bad situation and it was long-term that I wasn't very good at. Who'd guess things might change? Certainly, not me.

(For your information: here, and here.)

Obstacle 1

2010-02-19T22:37:00.000-08:00

We had a conversation the other day (yesterday? my memory is absolutely terrible), Corey and I, wherein I said that everything is on the table. Everything. We were talking about the future, you see. Maybe our future, maybe not - he's much smarter than I am, and often he makes sure I'm following his train of thoughts and sometimes it goes over my head - but the future. And as clumsily as always, I realized two things, long after the actual conversation had taken place. It doesn't discount the validity of either realization, but sometimes I wish my brain didn't have so many holes.

The first is the most obvious one. Not everyone thinks the way I do. My father has been telling me this for years and I've often, with reason or not, just brushed him aside and thought he was just being an angry old man, obtuse, set in his ways, and unable to understand. Corey's been telling me over the last year or so that everyone thinks a certain way...except me. Over our Valentine's Day weekend, we were walking along somewhere in San Diego, and I don't recall exactly what the conversation was, but at one point Corey said I seem to not choose to participate in what seems to be the norm for people our age, or just people in general. After a few hours, I think while we were having sushi (an underwhelming adult experience for me, which I don't understand, especially after having had eel (gross!!) for the first), I said to him that I liked what he said, that I choose not to participate. Because I don't.

Funny thing about me is I go under the assumption that whenever I'm talking and sharing with anyone, from my family and boyfriend, to strangers and co-workers, everyone knows what I mean when I say things I believe about marriage and music and family and films and books and politics. Because what I believe is the right thing, you see. It's everyone else who just doesn't get it. And for thirty-three years, having this assumption, well, can I just say I am wrong? And what really set this off like a neon sign in a quiet suburban street was when Corey and I were talking about the future, a hypothetical future, sure, but I was getting frustrated with the way the conversation was going because I couldn't understand why Corey didn't get what I was saying...until we were in the car and I realized that, despite whatever the topic is, I believe whoever I'm talking should automatically understand what I'm saying because I think...I don't really know why. Look at my arrogance.

The frustration Corey and my father and others probably feel/felt is completely justified and my own is regrettably not. Which means that I'm more close-minded than I think I am. Because I often don't let other people's sentiments and ideas and beliefs and traditions to come over and play with mine because I feel mine are right and just and theirs are not. How fucking insane is that of me!? And after having this little "ah-ha!" moment, I wondered why anyone talks to me (which I say often to these lovely people in my life, but I think I finally get what I mean to say).

The second thing I came to realize is that as far as the future is concerned, EVERYTHING is up for grabs!

Okay, so I just spent a page telling you how close-minded I am, yes? Well, this is the part where I tell you that I believe in the future and in the future everything is fair game: family and love and marriage and divorce and money and travel, etc. Because who I am now isn't who I was five, ten, seventeen years ago; who I am now isn't who I'll be tomorrow, nevermind the years from now. And because of this, as Corey and I were in the middle of the aforementioned conversation, I realized that every option for us is on the table. As it should be.

We were talking about us, of course we were. And when I say that the possibility of being together with the one you love for the rest of your life without it being marriage, that's valid. Just as it's valid that somewhere along the road I want to get married is also valid. One does not negate the other; both possibilities can coexist in the future. Because, you see, for me to say 'never' about everything is pretty much selfish and arrogant (there's that word again!) and plain stupid, I think. Conversely, I think when it comes to people, we should continuously remain open to every possibility. Because of all that stuff they teach you about the road less traveled, sure, but also because even when you go down a well-traveled path, it doesn't mean that you're not going to find interesting stops along the way...as long as you're willing to stop.

Reading this as I type it sounds pretty dumb because it tastes like everyone would tell me, "Duh! Javier, everyone knows this already!" if they were to hear me say so. Thing is, probably this is true, but I tell you what, me, realizing things about myself happens so infrequently, when it does happen, it's outstanding. Because I definitely don't want to be the main obstacle in my life.

Anyway: TO THE FUTURE!!!

Cute Monster

2010-02-19T00:13:00.001-08:00

I would totally let him eat me.

We Laugh

2010-02-04T23:07:00.000-08:00

What's been happening isn't anything that's too surprising...for me.

And what's been happening is also one of the most beautiful adventures of my thirty-three years.

My lack of a life plan never included anything like what Corey brings to my life. And that IS surprising. What isn't is that I click so well with him. That he gets me and if he doesn't he tries to (people just don't try anymore, do they?). And he's funny and insanely smart and beautiful and such a nerd and such a lovely human. I say a lot how lucky I am to have him in my life, and I know I am. It isn't often if ever that anyone out in the world who isn't family, with one exception, astonishes me as much as he does. This is no hyperbole.

So, this man in the photo with me (which he took), the one I'm laughing with (were we laughing at the idea of taking pictures? waking up in the hotel after little sleep and lots of nakedness?), is he the one I've been waiting for only I didn't know it? I don't know...

...but I definitely want to find out.

Boy

2010-01-25T21:03:00.000-08:00

There really is something about a boy in jeans.

I'm lying naked on his bed and he comes out of his bathroom, a towel around his shoulders and I see the way his muscles are relaxed and he walks over to his dresser and picks out a pair of briefs and walks over to his closet and puts them on and in that very oh-my-! way they fit him - hugging him in every right way - I can't help but look as he picks out a pair of blue jeans and he leans over to put one leg through and then the other, the sinew of his back bends and flexes in near-apocalyptic ways, and he rights himself and buttons them and he throws his towel at me because I've been watching him with such awe, I must look like I've a few too many chromosomes.

It's the way he holds my hand as we walk down the street.

It's certainly the way when I open my eyes and meet his gaze and see that smile as he lies beneath or on top of me. I wonder what he's thinking. Because I'm thinking I'm this fortunate that this is who I get to share this rightnowthisverysecond moment with. Makes me think of things like fairy tales being true and genuine. Maybe is the lack of space between our skins that seals what's wonderful about this moment, feeling him writhe all along my body, the way his flesh gives way to mine and the way his sweat makes him taste.

The way when we're sitting in the dark of a movie theater, watching some story that's already derivative of something from ten years back, and maybe we're both leaning into the armrest between us just so that our arms are touching and I move to cross my leg ankle to knee, his thigh mere millimeters away, and he slides a hand over my leg and clasps mine and we continue watching the movie and i rest my head on his shoulder and everything is alright with the world.

It's not surrender when he wins.

And when I see him for the first time on any given sun-flooded day, he smiles and says hi and puts his arms around me and I've mine around his waist and I can feel him everywhere and he kisses me the way it supposed to be and I smell the way he smells and there's no music playing but that's okay.

Fate

2010-01-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

As I'm typing this, I should be changing clothes and I got a text message saying, "p.s. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!" from Corey.

Today, I turned thirty-three years old. And I think and I wonder what's the big deal with me? Why's it that even a birthday is more problematic for me than it need be? Of course, it's not always about me, so I just need to get over it.

Thirty-two was very impressive. I'm not prone to thinking about fate or destiny in any way, but, as I said to Corey on new year's day, perhaps the preceding year needed to happen the way it did because I learned so much from it. It hurt me and it loved me unlike anything ever before. It isn't hyperbole. I can look back and see various instances where I got a chance to show all my little cracks everywhere and be adored for it; I allowed myself to not be a piece of sharp metal all the time. My family and I, this year was very precarious and I'm glad well all came out of it relatively unscathed. And, for me, thirty-two showed me what I'm missing in my life.

Spent a lot of time with the best friend from the very beginning. Probably the most in nearly five years since I left Las Vegas. And as it's worked out, she was my foil through this last year. I don't know if she knows it, but with her reflecting what's good and right and appropriate at various points, I could see nearly every single time that what I did and said or not had value or had value taken away. I hardly ever see things in these terms. Because, mostly, I see life as a series of unconnected events I get the chance to wade through. And I still believe this. But just because I go through these experiences and see these people, I have a say in how it will all turn out.

Some things just are. But not everything can be left up to chance.

Golden and I would say often how we should be more punk rock about life and take chances. She and I exchange this little bit of wisdom, and I, for one, didn't stick to it. And now that thirty-three is here to stay, I'm reminded of something else I wrote late last year (which I deleted because I'm done with those histrionics).

I'm not going to foretell this year, but what I've seen so far of it, I love. Truly. Because already I'm just walking through a series of events and letting them happen to me. I'm exacting some of it. Big shock: it's better. Some things just are, true. Others do mean a lot more than anticipated. And yet, others cannot just be left alone. What I see for myself as far as I can taste is a wonderful man in my life, a family that's suffered (and still is) but who still remains united, my best friend making me grow more than I think she even knows, a job that's actually enjoyable and could take me places.

I'm rambling.

Thanks to my family and Golden and Corey, thirty-two was infuriatingly necessary. Thirty-three, because of all of them, will be extraordinary. Might even call it fate.

Yes

2010-01-15T23:30:00.000-08:00

Third week of the new year's coming up, you see.

I don't date is the easiest way to put it because it's succinct and accurate. Because I don't. Most people, good Christ, I can't stand them. But that's not entirely true: I love people of all shapes and flavors. It's when they want to get close to me or I them, they lose their appeal. Which is fine. As I mentioned before, I'm not in this life situation to collect ex's. I'm not looking for my next person to date once this one is done with. Who does that? Why? I never really got it.

Over the last few weeks I've been thinking...

"And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them, Will you take my heart—stains and all?” and they say, “I will,” and they ask you the same question, and you say, “I will,” too."

...and what I seem to have come up with is a really simplistic answer to a pretty complex question. Because no, I'm not in this to collect ex's. I'm not.

Metal

2010-01-05T12:44:00.001-08:00

Sitting in my car as I type this:

Last night we're on the phone and I'm on the verge of tears and maybe she doesn't notice but she's telling me exactly what I need to hear and I know it all to be true because I believe these things about myself and what my value is but probably because I'm a pretty prideful person I don't want to make time for more truth and seeing as how one bad day has turned into two I really ought to own these little tidal waves of emotion and allow myself to feel hurt and sad and cry my eyes raw but as I said to her this doesn't happen to me because I don't make it a habit of developing anything with other people because usually [they're] not worth my effort and she says how perhaps this is different and I know it is but that doesn't mean much to me right now.

I think it's so stupid of me to feel bad. These things happen so infrequently. Call it what you will, I'm made of metal and I can't have anymore of it. And it creeps in from the edges of my days. I feel so foolish.

Maybe one good long cry and that will be that. Maybe that's what I'll do tonight.

- sent from the world via BlogPress.

Crooked Little Vein

2010-01-04T18:07:00.001-08:00

"If even half of what you’ve told me about yourself is true, you should’vs turned into the world’s biggest asshole years ago. But you’re sweet and you’re funny and you don’t give up. You know how hard it is, finding someone in this town who’s still determined?"

- Warren Ellis, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN

The Sandman

2010-01-04T00:43:00.001-08:00

"Love…Have you ever been in love?…Horrible, isn’t it?…It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…you give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t you own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like ‘maybe we should just be friends’ or ‘how perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart…It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love."

— neil gaiman, THE SANDMAN: THE KINDLY ONES

Insomnia?

2010-01-04T00:27:00.001-08:00

Can't sleep and I know why.

That's the worst.

Vulnerable

2010-01-02T12:30:00.001-08:00

Sometimes it's enough to just cut yourself open for the world to see...

...trick is not missing the opportunity to do so.

- sent from the world via BlogPress.

Squander

2010-01-02T02:48:00.000-08:00

In the fall, I had this weird realization: with all the social networking (a phrase I hate, but HAVE TO embrace) everywhere, I know a lot more about strangers than most people I know personally. Which is a little sad I think. I mean, people with whom I share zip codes and cities, I should know them better, shouldn't I? I thought if it was my own aloofness that was making me think this way, but couldn't see that was the reason. Or the only reason. Over the last three weeks or so, as it turns out, I've come to discuss this strange realization with people I know pretty well, and, ignoring the sheer irony of that, I think I came to a pretty sad conclusion: not just anybody rates. In this case 'anybody' means me.

I'm not sure if disconnected is the right word. Probably more like abandoned.

Look, a couple years ago, Golden said to me how she's come to realize that people come and go in and out of your life for particular reasons, and it doesn't mean everyone's going to be close to you, no matter how much you'd like it. I kind of didn't want to accept this. Not until now. Which, in just typing it out right now, makes me feel so naive. But she is right.

I'm feeling a bit off. Probably sad and resentful and I'd really rather not be. But I can't help thinking about when I found out I was sick and thought I could go somewhere I could get that support and that attention I know I was entitled to. And not just that day, but for the remainder. It was the single most important day of my life and I hate feeling I squandered it. Is that wrong and unfair of me, heaping this huge responsibility onto someone who really didn't need it, couldn't handle it, or possibly never wanted it? What is it that I thought would come from it? I'm not sure, but I suppose as I think about it more and more, and little bits of anger grow, had I known how it's all worked out in two-plus years, I wouldn't have bothered.

It's just past three in the morning and I'm thinking about this now.

Have I said? I hate the twenty-first century.

Thirty-three Januaries

2010-01-01T23:44:00.000-08:00

I'm ready: bring on the rest of 2010!

"My boy, when the devil cannot reach us through the spirit...he creates a woman beautiful enough to reach us through the flesh."

Alone, Together

2009-12-31T21:02:00.000-08:00

Everything and everyone's winding down. I said earlier how everything in 2009, for better and not, I don't know that I would change it:

"2009, you were really good to me. really you were. showed me so many things i am capable of and not; that i can be closer to the person i want to be; that i can have people around me who love and appreciate my cynical heart. over all, you were honest to me, 2009. honest about everything and everyone, especially, when it came down to me, you made me cry when i needed to, and fear, and work, and struggle and pay and learn and adapt and, yes, even suffer a little. because i needed to.

so, 2009, thank you for the laughs and tears and holding my hand, even though i probably didn’t know i needed it."

Of course, what I am taking the most from it all is what three people in my life have shown me about themselves and about me.

My older brother, Rene, has been with me through everything. EVERYTHING. Stout and resolute, he's never let me down. He's picked me up every single time I've fallen and scraped my shins. He loves me unlike anyone in the world. I know it, and I feel it to be true. And it's more than fraternal and familial love. He's concerned if I've taken my meds, if I've money, if I'm sad. We have an open relationship after a fashion, but we never verbalize everything. I tell him I'm going out on a date, he laughs and says, 'Did she lose a bet?' and I tell him, 'No, he didn't,' and he clams up, unsure and maybe a little bit put off. But he asks me the day after if I had a good night. Without him in my life I'd be a poorer example of being a man and being a part of my family. And, you know, as we get older, and he sees my hair loss and I see the way he plays with his little girl, I can't ever imagine him being any other sort of person. In 2009, he was the most stable of everyone I know in every way possible, always level-headed, never an asshole, always firm but caring. And at my lowest points over the last year, he stood up for me when I felt no one else would or could.

Golden is my best friend and she makes me laugh. This year, for us both, has been full of everything great and everything sad that makes up our lives, people like us: grown ups that are still forming. I spent an early morning in January on her balcony in Las Vegas and we smoked our cigarettes and talked heartache for a little while and laughed over vegan donuts. And when I came to see her and she came to see me, she showed me so much strength and so much heart, I can never compete with her. Because she's one of a kind. The only woman I know my age who is everything wonderful in the world and owns her femininity like a perfect dress. This year we cried lots together, and she showed me the true meaning of love and sentiment and passion and truth. I don't tell her nearly enough, but she is what I aspire to be as a human. And even when everything seems lost, when seemingly everything and everyone was not rooting for me, she was, because she always has. She's the little sister I never had and I can't ever imagine my life without her in it.

(How I hear things in my head and then set down in words feels like such babble and such cliche.)

Corey is my unexpected bonus this year. I rail on and on about hating people and along comes this beautiful man into my life. And this year he showed me love in every form I've known and not and I can't be more grateful for it. Through the hours and days and months of knowing him and getting to know him, I see a person so unlike me that something in my heart and brain unlocks open to everything new I don't know and wasn't even aware existed. At my worst, he stood by me unlike anyone else has whom I've been involved with. He listened to me and heard my stories and told me his. He held my hand in the dark movie theater and told me exactly what I needed to hear every time without fail, and I am thankful for it. Because I couldn't ask for anything else in a man than everything he is. Killer smile.

I'm not feeling my best right now: everywhere everyone I love, so far away from me and that lonesome feeling still stings a bit.

I wouldn't be me without these people. Because all of them know everything about me and I love them for it. For making me be better no matter how hard I try to tantrum away. They see something in me that makes them care about me in ways I know no one else does. A new year, a new decade with three people who I love and admire and can't see my life without.

Good night, future.

2009?

2009-12-31T00:33:00.000-08:00

The year ends today and here I am, sitting in the cold dark, thinking about what's transpired. How cliche, hey? Nothing exciting on tap but I am pensive and introspective and a little hopeful and a little sad.

Which makes me think of what's wonderful and magical and amazing about my life.

Anansi Boys

2009-12-26T23:02:00.001-08:00

"Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs."

- Neil Gaiman, ANANSI BOYS

The Hidden War

2009-12-26T02:53:00.000-08:00

i don't care: i want to cry.

2002 seems like forever ago and i can't wait to get back there. twenty-five and nothing was different. man, when i get back there, you'll see.

but it wasn't much to look at, you know. and i remember being so fucking smug when i returned to las vegas in october of that year: staying at claudia's place on boulder and lake mead, drunken conversations, debauch sex in the fall sun. it wasn't a good year, no.

maybe it's how much i hold against myself. no excuses, no one ever says you're doing too much. no one ever says a thing. and maybe a little tiny crack showed but everyone's too goddamm polite to say so.

there isn't much left going on: and i sliced my hand open on a fairly new wound (from this last weekend) and how time moves: nearly a week later. and i'm bleeding while working and i don't notice it until it drips onto the floor.

i wouldn't trade it for the world. but i hate how it feels like i need a jumpstart every fucking time i wake up.

(c)2008

Dig

2009-12-25T23:19:00.000-08:00

i wish i didn't know it could exists. that it could happen. and every time i see you i know what's behind your eyes, i can feel it. i know it's there and i know you love me. of that there is no doubt. but what's missing is its sheen. because there are no more compromises to make, and none i'm willing to make and all we have is...just love. a love that's done. i don't question your feelings nor mine. our love has just run its course. our love has used up all its magic, and i wish i didn't know there was such a thing.

(c)2008

Christmas Is Over

2009-12-25T23:11:00.000-08:00

I'm lonely.

Girl

2009-12-24T19:17:00.000-08:00

girl, i love...

...the way my tee shirt fits you; the way you hold out your hand in the mornings for the first embrace; how you smile when i say something i don't mean to be funny; the way you twist your hair when you're thinking; how very much you laugh when your favorite movie's on; how you drink a cup of hot chocolate; when you say thanks after i make you breakfast; the way you look at me, even when you're pissed at something wrong i did; how you read, serious and stern; when you browse the electronic bins at the record shop; when you read the comic books i know you'll like; when you listen to your new favorite band; when we argue about what's inconsequential; when you accept my apology; when you tell me it's going to be better tomorrow; when you tell me how today's all we have; when you concentrate and furrow your brow; when you turn the stereo to loud; when you try on that new pair of jeans; when we walk along the beach; when you telephone me and say you got home alright; when you call me and ask me how i am; when we plan a trip; how much you care; the way your daughter talks to you; the way we're not polar opposites; and when you say you'll miss me when i'm gone.

warren ellis: 'Another day down the mines of our lives. We drink 'til we stink and smoke 'til we choke because that's how we get things done, you and me. Spending our lives making things and making things out of our lives, because anything else would be dull as hell. And we're damned if we're going to sit at the other end of whatever years we get saying, well, what the fuck was that for? Years of scars, lipstick, and tears. And every day the dawn comes on we turn our eyes up in surprise, saying: there's that goddamn sun again.'

(c) 2008